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Content marketing is one of the most effective components of inbound marketing. When successfully implemented, good content has been proven to help attract more web traffic, nurture qualified leads, build brand trust, increase brand authority and more. However, content marketing is just one facet of your inbound marketing strategy. You should also be maintaining a social media presence, especially since doing so will only enhance your content marketing efforts. The following are four ways that you can improve your content marketing strategy through the use of social media:
1. Increase your content’s exposure
Without social media, the majority of your content’s views is coming through the use of SEO. While the use of SEO can certainly help expose your content to your target audience, not all of your site’s visitors are going to connect with your content or your brand. In fact, many of the people that see your site on their search results page may not even click on your link. Because of this uncertainty, other avenues for building your reader base should be explored, and one way to do this is through social media.
When you post content to social media, followers will like, share or comment on it. When this happens, their friends and followers are more likely to see your content on their timelines. The more people that see it, the better the chances are that you increase your reader base. This process of gradually increasing your exposure from one group of connections to another group of connections is how content goes viral. You can also generate the same type of exposure by adding social share buttons to all of the content you post on your main website.
2. Repurpose old content
As time passes, older content tends to get buried on your website. Few readers are going to search through blog posts that you posted years ago when they visit your site unless those posts are uncovered via a specific keyword search. Although you can’t just repost that old content as new blog posts (you’ll be hit with penalties for having duplicate content by Google if you do), you can repurpose older content through the use of social media. For example, if you have an older article that contains a list of facts, you can post those facts by themselves on platforms like Twitter as a way to provide your followers with a snippet of helpful information or to incite discussion.
There’s also no harm in posting a link to older content on social media to introduce newer followers to content that they may have missed. Just make sure that when you do this that the content remains relevant and that it isn’t outdated.
3. Encourage more engagement
Making sure that your readers are engaged with the content that you create is very important. It’s why so many businesses have comment sections on their blog. This allows readers to share their opinion, ask questions and more. By encouraging readers to engage in such a manner, it becomes easier for you to build a relationship with them, especially if you reply to their comments and engage in conversation. Social media is by nature social, which means that followers are much more likely to comment or share content that you post, whether you’re posting questions or blog posts from your site. Because of how easy it is to post on social media, it’s an extremely effective way to connect with followers on a personal level. Because of this, using social media to foster conversation around your content can strengthen the impact that your content has on readers.
4. Find new ideas for content
One of the main challenges that content creators often have is figuring out what kind of content is relevant to their target audience. The last thing you want to do is waste valuable resources creating content nobody cares about, after all. By remaining active on social media, you can find out a lot about your target audience that can guide you in the right direction in terms of generating new content. Pay attention to the questions that followers ask, the comments they make, the things that they complain about and the types of content that gets the most engagement. This information can be incredibly useful in helping you figure out what kind of content will appeal to them.
Both content marketing and social media marketing are extremely effective strategies for any online marketing campaign; however, it’s when they are used in conjunction that you will really start to see results. By using your social media presence to aid in your content marketing strategy, you’ll find that your content will have a much bigger impact in terms of reaching your marketing goals.
