11 Effective Ways to Use Social Media to Promote Your Content

You’ve spent hours researching, analyzing, and finally creating compelling content to help you reach whatever content marketing objective you have. Just like authors who write a book, you’ll probably need to spend as much if not more time promoting the content than the actual writing of it. Where better to promote your content than where we spend more than 25% of our online time: Social media. 80% of marketers are already promoting their content in social media – but are they doing it effectively? Now it’s time to take your social media promotion to the next level. 

Here are 11 effective ways to use social media to promote your content that you might not already be doing enough of.

Embrace the visual

We all know that tweets with images get more engagement. We’ve known for awhile that photos on Facebook get more engagement. Even images on LinkedIn get more engagement. Three of the “newest” social networks, Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat, are based entirely on the visual. So why aren’t you leveraging the visual when promoting your content? Create not only a branded “featured image” to share with your post, but also create separate images for each of the main points in your content so that they can be shared when you repeatedly post them to social media (see below for more on that point).

Headlines matter

You’re writing great content, but are you writing a title that is worthy of grabbing someone’s attention in social media? If not you either need to

1. Create better titles that will allow your posts to be more effectively promotable in social media or…

1. Create a new title that you will use to share your content in social media. Don’t just settle for one title: Because you should be posting your content multiple times, you should be creating multiple titles and even doing A/B testing to see what types of headlines are more effective to promote your content on what social networks. You might also want to use a tool like BuzzSumo to help you research effective titles for the same type of content per social network.

Customize for the platform

When sharing content, take advantage of the customizable posting features allowed on the social media platform being used. This includes the headline, image and a description of the content you are sharing. Every marketer and social media user is competing to catch the user’s eye, so the more optimized your post is for that particular platform the more effective your social media promotion will be.

For example, if you shared a link via Facebook, you have the opportunity to create a post that truly will stand out amongst the rest; all you need is an attention-grabbing headline, a clean, relevant image that piques interest which might be different from the featured image used in your content, and a short, compelling description.

With this formula, you can entice readers to click on your content. In the same manner, appending your content with hashtags can help make your content more discoverable for those social networks that support them.

Share at the right time

Though this tip may seem like common sense, most content marketers get too caught up in other aspects and overlook this simple concept. Because you want the content you are sharing to reach as many people as possible for maximum engagement, you have to go where the crowd is and when they are most likely online and active. Then, you can compile a posting schedule and make it a habit to post during a certain time of day.

Keep in mind that different social media platforms may not have the same peak times. While there are many infographics that will tell you when the best time to post in social media is, some of it simply comes down to both understanding how users engage on each social network and experimenting. Some social media platforms have features designed to aid you in this process, such as Facebook Insights. In addition, there are 3rd party tools such as FollowerWonk that can help estimate the best time for some platforms.

Don’t be afraid to post multiple times

There are numerous data studies that suggest you can be more effective by promoting the same content multiple times in social media. Now that you hopefully have multiple images and multiple headlines for your content, you can engage with your social media followers without them even knowing that the link is going to the same content you posted earlier. In fact, since social media users don’t see most of your social media posts on any given day anyway, consider posting multiple times to social media as a way to ensure that your audience has a chance to see your content.

Ask questions

Don’t just drop links. Drive social media users to communicate with you – and increase the chances that they engage with your content – by asking for questions and feedback. Because social media was made for people and not for businesses, you should always be striving to create a human connection with social media users.

The beauty of social media marketing is that it can be used to improve both your public relations as well as content marketing by simply asking for a response. To generate feedback and promote engagement on social media, include a question with the shared content that compels readers to respond. Better yet, create questions for some of your headlines and test the waters. Questions are a great attention-grabber, and will help foster a community of connection that will result in more effective social media promotion.

Share on the right platform

With so many new social media sites sprouting up vying for attention, it can be hard to keep up. Just when we thought we knew everything with the emergence of Ello, now comes Tsu. While having accounts on these various sites can be advantageous for fostering innovation and staying creative, it can be difficult to choose which platform to post your content to.

Since different sites serve different purposes and audiences, it needs to be repeated that it’s important to get familiar with the major social media platforms used by your target audience. Avoid redundancy, and simply “dumping” content across all channels. Concentrate on the platforms where you have the highest chance to engage with your audience. Use this list of content promotion tools to see which platform will best fit your needs.

Once your social media promotion is successful on these platforms, use what information you have gleaned to start embarking on a new platform. Don’t forget to share your multimedia content to social networks like Slideshare, iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher and, of course, YouTube.

Pay to play

Why do you pay for Likes or Follows when you can promote your content to a micro-targeted audience in social media? Paid Social is now mainstream, with paid promotion of content into the news feeds of social media users where you are guaranteed visibility from a relevant audience. If you haven’t done so already, now is the time to start shifting your budget to experiment in this area, whether that is on Twitter, Facebook or another network.

Maximize your brand advocates

Does your company have an employee advocacy program? Even if you don’t have a structured program, having more employees or partners that might already be sharing your content do so more regularly can only help promote your content in social media. Fortunately, there are many tools that have been created that make it easy to manage and measure social media sharing by brand advocates.

Leverage communities

An employee advocacy program is one way of leveraging communities and utilizing the strength in numbers approach to promote your content to more social media users. However, you first have to have a community in order to do so. There are already literally more than two million communities that exist within LinkedIn alone, not to mention additional ones in the form of Twitter chats, Google Plus communities, shared Pinterest boards, and even Facebook Groups.

Joining and becoming an engaging member of relevant communities will give you the chance to promote your content to a very targeted audience of social media users that could be in the hundreds, thousands, or even more! The largest LinkedIn Group has more than one million members! (There’s even a community to talk more about content marketing & content promotion, called The Content Marketing Forum)

Experiment with content creator communities

I saved this for last because it is not everyone’s cup of tea, but there are a number of communities such as Triberr, Social Buzz Club, and Viral Content Buzz that exist outside of social media for the sole purpose of bringing together content creators and enhancing your social media promotion. If the content you discover on one of these sites is something you would considering curating, then this might be a good site to consider promoting your own content on.

What’s Next

When it comes to promoting content, social media is one of the most powerful tools available; however, most content marketers fail to truly maximize its potential. By utilizing one or all of these 11 ways to promote your social media content you will be well on your way to generating a lot more traffic from social media for your precious content.

SOURCE: Curata