How to Leverage Social Media to Fuel Your Content Marketing Campaigns

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Do you want to know how to effectively utilize the power of social media to bolster your content marketing campaigns? Do you have a content marketing strategy in the works, but are unsure how to leverage social media to drive the campaign and get the best results possible?

Here’s the thing:

Just like how SEO (search engine optimization) and content are inseparable, social media and content marketing work well together as well. One is less effective without the other. That’s a fact you must learn to accept if you want a successful content marketing campaign.

The world of digital marketing is a complex and ever-changing landscape that requires a lot of different factors to work together in order to achieve a common goal. And one of the factors that play a significant role in any digital marketing campaign is content; quality content to be exact.

Now, which factor serves as a conduit to drive your content and make sure it reaches the right pair of eyeballs, the right kind of audience, as far-reaching as possible? The answer is simple: social media. That is the role social media plays in the digital marketing process.

Every seasoned website content writer knows this. He or she is aware of the significance of social media when it comes to developing digital marketing strategies and the proper dissemination of content.

But before we discuss how you can effectively use social media to enhance your content marketing campaign, let us first figure out what is content marketing and why it is important in the overall scheme of running a business in the digital age.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a form of marketing that requires the production and sharing of a wide range of online works i.e. content such as articles, blog posts, videos, and infographics. The content being created and disseminated, regardless of the type, does not necessarily promote brands.

Instead, it is intended to stimulate or spark interest among targeted audiences in specific products and/or services being offered by a particular business. And social media is the primary means of disseminating content, making it an integral aspect in the content marketing process.

Now that you have a basic understanding of what content marketing is and what it does for your products and/or services, and your brand as a whole, let’s take a look at social media and how you can use it to maximize your content marketing campaign.

Integrating Social Media into Your Content Marketing Strategy

In the past, social media and content marketing were seen by the vast majority of Internet users and marketers as two interchangeable components of digital marketing. For the most part, this was a reasonable assumption, especially when you start to see that there’s a bit of overlap between both concepts when it comes to the digital marketing process.

However, the relationship between social media and content marketing is less complex than most people think. Here is an easy way of understanding their roles:

Social media requires good quality content in order to function effectively, while content marketing needs social media to:

• Gain a better understanding of the target market. Social media can be used as a pair of ears for understanding your audience, what they like, what they care about, and what is relevant to them so you can develop content relevant to their interest.
• Disseminate your content through the appropriate channels, thus making sure that they reach the intended audience. Content marketing is only as good as its ability to capture the attention of the right audience. And you need social media to do that.

The point is, to be effective in the world of digital marketing; you need to utilize both components in a synergistic approach. It’s virtually impossible to implement an effective content marketing campaign without social media—and vice versa—in today’s digital landscape.

Social Media and Content Marketing: Where to Begin?

To start with, this is not a chicken-and-egg thing. Every successful social media presence begins with a sound content marketing process. And every successful content marketing strategy revolves around a solid social media process.

Although social media can be effective in determining the interests of specific markets, setting up a strong social media presence for your brand requires a few things. Such as:

• The focal point for all your content. This includes your business website, your landing pages, your blog, and so on. All of these are crucial elements for your content marketing campaign, especially since this is where you eventually direct followers (your target audience) from your social media posts.
• Sufficient resources to maintain a strong and consistent social media presence. We’re not just talking about financial resources here. Yes, you might spend a few bucks in the process, but that’s not exactly a major concern. The fact that it’s a low-cost venture makes social media so popular among small businesses and startups.
• The more important thing here is the time and effort that you need to invest in your social media. You may have to employ a dedicated social media manager to take care of this particular process so you can focus on other aspects of your business.
• A good content strategy with a firm understanding of who your followers are. You need to have a solid grasp of what you want to communicate and whom you are relaying your messages to using the social media platform you’ve chosen.

Now that you know the basic ingredients in the initial process of merging your social media and content marketing efforts, let’s check out some of the effective methods you can use to further maximize your social media strategy to boost your content marketing campaign.

The Fundamental Elements of Social Media in the Content Marketing Process

1. Utilizing social media buttons in every post/content.

In every blog post, article, or news you read online these days, you will notice a bunch of different social media icons either on the top, bottom, or left/right hand side of the page you’re currently viewing. These are known as social sharing buttons. They will allow readers to share your content in the social media platform available, whether it’s Facebook, twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and so on.

This is important because as creator of the content, you want your readers to share what they’ve just experienced to their own circle of friends on social media. The more people share your content, the more eyeballs it will get. And the more views it gets, the more likely they will visit your website or blog for more content, which in turn increases traffic to your website.

2. Optimizing content for different social networks.

Whether you’re utilizing just one social media platform or more than a handful, you need to consider the unique characteristics and the kind of audience that are in each of these social networks. Facebook, for instance, has very different qualities and a different method of capturing audiences compared to twitter or Pinterest.

The bottom line: If you want your content to succeed and reach as many of your target audience as possible, you need to focus on optimizing your posts and your messages to suit the social network you are currently on.

3. Share quality content at optimal times to ensure maximum views from the target audience.

Believe it or not, there is a right and wrong time to post your content on social media. But this, however, doesn’t mean that there is a specific time considered best for posting on social networks.

What this means is that if you consider your target audience, know their habits and know precisely when they usually go on social media to update their status or check their news feeds, you will have a good idea as to when you should share your content to make sure that it gets the most views. By posting at optimal times, you can give your content the best chance of reaching the right set of eyes on social media.

Now, based on the information indicated here, you can see just how crucial social media is when it comes to content marketing; and how content—good quality content that is—plays a significant role in the social media process.

So whether you’re just starting to develop your content marketing campaign or you already have one ready to be implemented, make sure that you use social media wisely and effectively to maximize your results. You can’t expect your content marketing campaign to be successful without social media, and you can’t develop a strong social media presence without relevant and engaging content.