5 Content Marketing Tips on Social Media for Small Businesses
If you own or operate a business that is reliant on web traffic in order to drive sales, much of your marketing efforts should be focused on attracting visitors to your website and converting them from prospects to clients or customers. One way to gain targeted web traffic through social media is to implement a content marketing strategy. Content Marketing is the process of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage your target audience. Let’s consider 5 Content Marketing tips to help your small businesses to build credibility, increase brand awareness, establish relationships and provide value to your target audience.
Keep social media posts "short and sweet"
Social networks use algorithms to read and analyze every social media post. The ever-changing algorithms determine what sort of content will be displayed in users feed. The algorithms analyze the post content (words, photos, link credibility), timing and users feed preferences among many other factors. Most social networks tend to favor short and meaningful content as well as engagement. Users are also more likely to view and interact with smaller ‘bite-sized’ content.
Share your own unique content to build your brand
Many small businesses are unaware of the significant advantages that unique content serves. Besides developing a brand and interacting with customers or clients, the objective of social media marketing is to drive traffic to your website to either attain email addresses, sales or prompt the visitor to contact you. If you are not sharing content on social media that is not inbound to your website, it simply isn’t going to result in web traffic. Use your content as a magnet. When you share content from other websites you will be providing value by sharing useful industry-related tips or entertaining your followers. When you share content from your own website you are trying to attract visitors to it where you will be able to encourage the desired transaction. It is often recommended to share a mix of outside and unique content. This will decrease the amount of content that you will be required to make and still allow for you to share useful content that will help you to enhance your digital brand.
Post content that will make followers look good when they share it
Engagement seems to be a metric that social networks are taking increasing cues from when it comes to showing up more users newsfeeds. Social media is an excellent branding tool and by sharing content that your followers would look good to share, they will be more likely to share it which will help you to expand the reach of your post and company page.
Include a web link, photo, video or any other form of media to increase reach and engagement
When social networks use algorithms to sift through content, they seem to favor content that includes some form of media. Video seems to display more often than photos or posts with links oftentimes. Reach (or impressions) are the key to attaining more engagement which will lead to more exposure for your brand.
Popular forms of content include: photos, slideshares, blog posts, podcasts, videos, graphics, news updates, quotes, webinars and livestreams
Your web content can take many different forms. Live or native video content seems to perform at a very high level (especially on Facebook and Twitter) and I would expect to see this trend continue. A varied content strategy would be wise attract a diverse audience. Once you are able to determine what forms of content are the most effective, continue to build upon them.
Connect with us for more information regarding content marketing and social media tips. Contact us for a social media strategy development consultation to learn how to manage your social media accounts for your business or to outsource your social media marketing efforts.
I originally wrote this article for Business 2 Community. Click here to view it.
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Written by: Andrew C. Belton
Twitter: @Symmetricalmm
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