In the last article we talked about picking the best social media platform for your business, how to figure out your goals for your campaign, and what tasks you should work on in order to achieve your goals. That content should give you a solid grounding in social media and help you get started with your own campaign. In this article we’ll dive deeper into five different ways that you can use content marketing on social media, the do’s and don’ts of social marketing, and some resources that you can use to help you craft an awesome campaign.
Five Types of Content Marketing
If you plan on doing content marketing on social media, there are five different types of content that you can post to gain followers and boost your brand’s image. Depending on what kind of business you have, you may find several of these work better than others.
1. Entertain
Entertaining your audience is a great way to get them to share content, and to grow your Facebook page. You can entertain an audience by posting jokes, interesting memes, or funny stories. This can be an especially useful way to content market if there is a trending meme that you can tie into your business.
2. Inspire
Inspiring content grabs your audience’s attention and asks them to do something great or uplifting. It can be a true story, a link to a good article, or some other form of inspiration that you’ve found useful.
3. Converse
An effective way to communicate with your audience is to post conversational content. This type of content starts a dialogue between you and your followers. Converse content can be a question, a quote, or a contest that requires your followers to post something in the comment section.
4. Educate
People who like your company’s Facebook page probably do so because they’re interested in that niche and they want to find out more about it. They may consider you a thought leader, and posting educational content is a good way to reinforce that image. Educational content could be a link to an interesting article, or a free guide or eBook that you’ve created.
5. Convince
Convincing people to take a certain action that benefits you can be an important part of your social media strategy. If you’re a non-profit organization, you might want to convince people to donate to your cause. If you’re a business, you might need to convince people that your newest product is the best on the market. To do so, you might want to use customer testimonials and expert opinions.
The Do’s and Don’ts of Social Marketing
The following are a couple of quick tips that you can use to improve your campaigns and maximize your leverage on your favorite social media platforms.
The Do’s
- Write with passion. If you’re excited about what you’re posting, chances are your audience will get excited about it as well.
- Keep it short and sweet. If you want to write something longer you should consider opening a blog on your website.
- Always measure key metrics like views, conversion rate, and cost per sale. This will allow you to measure how effective your social media campaign is.
- Be visual and use images whenever possible. Images are a great way to grab the attention of distracted users.
- Use a content media calendar. You should be planning out your campaigns up to a month in advance. It’s not something that you should be winging on a day to day basis.
The Don’ts
- Neglect to prepare. “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” Get everything ready at least a week in advance, including images and the articles that you want to post.
- Focus on yourself and your business. As a rule, only 1 in 5 posts should promote your business or product. The other 4 should inspire, educate, or entertain your audience.
- Over-pitch a product. Your goal with social media marketing should be to get users to your squeeze page, not to make the sale right away.
Three Resources to Help You Create a Successful Campaign
There are a lot of resources available on the internet which can help you to create a successful campaign and grow your audience. Here are a couple of the most useful ones.
Drumup.io is a website that allows you to search through a database of interesting content, and then post that content to a social media platform. This is a great way to find interesting articles that relate to your particular niche.
Feedly.com is another resource for finding shareable content. Used together with Drumup, you’ll be able to find fresh new content that your followers will enjoy on a daily basis.
Hootsuite.com allows you to schedule content to be posted sometime in the future. That can make it easier to run your campaigns, as content will be posted automatically and you won’t have to worry about it. Hootsuite also shows you analytics about your posts, which can help you to refine your content for the future.
Creating a Great Website
Even if you create an amazing social media campaign and draw a large amount of attention to your product or service, if your website is sub-par then you’ll end up missing out on a lot of potential sales. To get some ideas about how to improve your site, or to get a quote on creating a new site from the ground up, contact Superiocity today! We’re a Florida based web design firm and we’ve created dozens of websites for our clients over the years.