The Best Social Media Advice For Content Marketers

How To Integrate Social Media Into Your Content Marketing Strategy

Social media runs on content, whether it’s status updates, photos (including videos), comments or your best content marketing.

This social content is the information that your target audience seeks and finds important, entertaining and useful. It’s not sales or promotional noise.

This is important for you as a content marketer since social media is where your customers spend their time, over an hour a day according to eMarketer.

The content marketing challenge:

Social media tends to have an impact in the middle of the purchase funnel according to research by AOL Platforms. This is bad news for marketers since it’s often difficult to measure. 

6 Content marketing experts tell you how to integrate social media into your content marketing strategy

To integrate social media into your content marketing plans to improve results, we interviewed 6 Content Marketing World 2015 presenters.

1. Heidi Cohen of Actionable Marketing Guide (Twitter handle: @HeidiCohen)
2. Bob Gilbreath of Ahalogy (Twitter handle: @MktgWithMeaning)
3. Erin Monday of Lenovo (Twitter handle: @ErinMonday) 
4. Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing (Twitter handle: @LeeOdden)
5. Matthew Patrick of Theorist Inc (Twitter handle: @MatPatGT)
6. Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute (Twitter handle: @JoePulizzi)

Q: What is your best social media advice for content marketers?

Here’s what these 6 content marketing rockstars advise you to do to increase your results using social media.

Heidi Cohen

Skip the pushy sales! Give your target audience the information they seek to solve their problems and entertain them. If you don’t, your competitor probably will!

Don’t underestimate the value of blogging. Not only is it a CMS (Content Management System) but also it’s an owned media entity. It won’t go away.

Download The Ultimate Blogging Checklist

Bob Gilbreath

Choose a handful of platforms upon which to focus instead of trying to check the box on everything. With focus comes improvement. 

Erin Monday

Be bold. Be brave. And never be afraid to dunk in the dark (hi, Oreo).

Lee Odden

Know your audience incredibly well.

Approach social media with a “give to get” perspective.

Be amazingly useful and at the same time, make it easy for people to find, engage and take action (including sharing, transacting, or referring).

Matthew Patrick

Find the right platform for your brand.

The social media landscape is too crowded and evolves quickly. It’s impossible for a brand to be everywhere at once.

So, take the time to research the key players and decide which platform makes the most sense for the audience you’re looking to target, the brand you’re looking to build, then focus your resources in that direction.

When a brand tries to be on all social media platforms at once, it ultimately under-serve all of them.

Joe Pulizzi

Before you do anything with social media, first understand WHY you are using it and what your differentiated story is. 

So many companies just dive right in. Experimentation is fine, but social media doesn’t work unless you have something worth talking about and sharing that has nothing to do with the products and services you sell.

 

Q: What is the biggest mistake content marketers make using social media?

One of the challenges with using social media as a content marketer is that everyone uses social media as part of their daily life so that they think that they’re an expert. In fact, this is why you shouldn’t use a college student to handle your social media strategy.

Social media is critical to your content marketing plans. Therefore it must be integrated into your content marketing strategy.

Heidi Cohen

Don’t viewing social media only as a promotional tool.

Social media provides marketers with increased ability to observe and interact with prospects, customers and fans in cost effective ways.

Leverage social media’s full potential with these 3 actionable social media tips.

1. Observe what your social media followers and those of your competitors are doing. (Here’s the data on what people do on social media.)
2. Get involved and understand the breadth of social media platforms. Continue learning about new platforms and tools.This doesn’t mean spending the day on social media communicating with your friends and family. (Note: You don’t need to use ALL  of them.)
3. Engage with your prospects and followers where and when they’re active on social media. You don’t have to be present everywhere.BTW–Here’s the biggest social media opportunity most businesses miss. 

Bob Gilbreath

Fooling themselves into thinking that people care what their brands have to say.

Brands really aren’t part of the conversation, but they can offer valuable content to help people make purchase decisions 

Erin Monday

Start tweets with “@” signs or “.”s. 

Lee Odden

Being too salesy or not bothering to ask for any action at all. 

Matthew Patrick

Marketers don’t understand the metrics of the platform they’re working on.

For instance a “View” on Facebook doesn’t mean the same thing as a “View” on YouTube or Snapchat or Instagram. Yet, time and time again, I see marketers valuing all those as being equal.

Each platform offers its own value proposition with a very different set of metrics to measure your ROI. Understanding those differences is essential for knowing how successful your campaign was.

 

The social media bottom line for content marketers:

Know your target audience and where they spend their time on social media.

Focus your efforts on the social media platforms that matter for your business. Don’t spread your resources too thinly by trying to be everywhere at once.

Use your content marketing to attract them on social media. Take the time to engage with your audience but don’t sell them.

Please join us at Content Marketing World.

Get the best social media advice for content marketers during the Social Media Track on Wednesday, September 9, 2015,. Learn from the content marketing rockstars how to improve your use of social media to achieve your business goals

If you don’t have a ticket yet, get one now!!! Just register NOW!

Don’t be shy–Find a reason to come up and say hello IRL.

Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen

P.S.  Need help? Get your content success checklist.

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Photo Credit: http://www.morguefile.com/archive/display/38710