We all know that creating great content and advertising it through various social media channels is an effective first step toward any content marketing success. However, if you aren’t utilizing distribution channels on top of promotion, you might be missing out on new areas to post new content for potential customers or followers to see. Using a combination of both content promotion and distribution is part of every prosperous content marketing strategy. Here are some great ways to promote and distribute your content - blend these two practices together for marketing success.
Promotion is all about communicating the value of your content directly to the people who will share it within their own networks. Quality content is only half the battle. Getting maximum exposure for that content is the other half. You can have the best content in the world, but it’s only as good as the visibility it receives.
What would social media be without its promotional benefits? You now have the opportunity to engage with people in a way that wasn’t possible for traditional marketers in the past. The kind of engagement social media allows can add a sense of familiarity to your brand image. By engaging through interesting, quality content, you can keep your brand in front of customers so that when they’re ready to look for products or services within your market, they’ll think of you!
After you have created that incredible content, don’t let it sit on your site waiting for searchers to find it - get a buzz going! By promoting your work, you generate interest in your content, and when people find interesting stuff, they naturally share it through social media or link to it from their websites. Let’s take a look at three big players in social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Let’s get one thing straight – Facebook is massive. Because of the sheer volume of activity on Facebook, it’s a great place to not only promote your content but also gauge how people think about topics and how they perceive your products or services. This can be greatly beneficial when brainstorming new topics, answering questions, or even fine-tuning existing content to drive people to your website.
Facebook gives you a chance to not only showcase engaging articles, images, and videos, but a way to create a two-way conversation with your audience. Ask your Facebook friends and followers to share their thoughts and feedback on your content, products, and services, or topics in the industry. This provides the opportunity to actively listen and improve your content based on their response. In the future, you can build customer loyalty and promote even better content that shows you used their feedback and worked to answer their issues.
The promotional benefits of Facebook are obvious. If you don’t already have a branded Facebook profile – you are behind the game. 30 million businesses now have a Facebook Fan Page. Start sharing your content and engaging with this enormous community.
As a content marketer, the primary purpose for Twitter should be to keep your followers informed about the all cool products and services that you are trying to promote. As with Facebook or any other social media channel, by meeting the needs of individual users head-on, you can actively promote your content to potential customers who are looking for answers.
Twitter won’t be an effective promotional tool if you don’t have any followers - it’s absolutely imperative that brands build a following. 67 percent of Twitter users are more likely to buy from brands they follow. This is why your brand’s Twitter handle should appear on every page of your site - of course, this rule goes for all the social media you use. If your page visitors like the content they find on your pages, they should be able to follow you in a heartbeat (and share your content).
So, what if you already have a following, and already have a lot of great content to promote? Some third-party applications like TweetDeck and HootSuite will help schedule Tweets so that you don’t bombard your audience over a short period of time. If there is one thing that can make your brand look robotic, it’s an overuse of social media promoting irrelevant content.
Remember, if your followers tweet at you, you should make an effort to respond in a timely way. It will be more challenging to respond to all tweets, especially as your following grows. Regardless, actively engaging with followers is one of the easiest ways to establish your brand as an authoritative voice within the industry. And with each Retweet or response via Twitter, the more you are promoting some sweet content for all to see. Check in to see who’s tweeted at you or mentioned you, and make an effort to respond.
Although Google+ is not as popular as Facebook or Twitter, it sets itself apart by strongly emphasizing SEO. Google+ allows you to embed links directly to your profile page, giving you increased visibility for your content and website once more people join your circles or click and engage with your link.
Google+ is a melting pot of influential leaders and casual audiences. These active online members have the same power to influence people with similar interests that Facebook and Twitter users do. Your brand must try to engage with the individuals leading the field, as well as those looking for more information in the form of your content. Share insights about your industry with them, and spark conversations on topics that will solidify your relationship with prospects and industry experts alike.
The core message for distribution is, “Find ways to get it out there!” The more your company can capitalize on the many distribution channels online, the more you will put great content in the hands of potential clients. Distribution is where you can really establish your brand’s industry knowledge and trustworthy insight. The more you create content for distribution, or repurpose content for distribution on multiple channels, the more your brand will show up in the SERPs, and the more opportunities you’ll create for sharing.
To capitalize on distributing your content, expand or repurpose it so that you can reach a range of new channels. If can create a multifaceted distribution strategy that operates on multiple channels, you might even fill several slots in the SERPs with your content. Here are a few examples of reusing and distributing your content:
Thirty-seven percent of marketers say blogs are the most valuable type of content marketing - and one of the easiest ways to repurpose and distribute great content is by revitalizing existing articles you’ve created and publishing them on other blogs. Don’t worry, this is not considered duplicate content; publishing updated and refreshed content is very different than copying and pasting old content onto a new site. Think about it, if you have blog posts that were successful on your blog, why not publish them on other sites to get more exposure? Your great content can live on another blog, while still driving leads or conversions back to your site.
For example: LinkedIn, the popular social network for business professionals, allows you to post new content on your profile. Share your great content among industry leaders and tap into their audience for maximum exposure.
Remember, when repurposing blog posts, ensure that any URL’s included in the article are still working, relevant and up-to-date. Any referenced statistics or images should be updated or changed in order to provide the most value to the readers. And most importantly, be sure that any subject matter is current and insightful for the other industry experts in your field.
If you’ve developed some cool, original photos or images, you should be sharing them through distribution channels as well as your site. Image sharing is a great way to keep people engaged with industry events and information. Photo distribution channels such as Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa not only raise the visibility of your content but also encourage it to be shared. Photo-sharing is a great way to keep people engaged with what’s happening in and around your industry.
Almost every photo-sharing site makes it easy to publish photos to other photo-centered social media sites like Instagram and Pinterest. This can make it extremely easy to expand your distribution throughout social media and connect to an even bigger audience. When you publish content to a photo site, share the photos to your social media platforms to let your networks know that you have new photo content available for viewing.
Video content is highly visible and one of the most popular content mediums. In fact, online video will make up nearly 70 percent of consumer Internet traffic by 2017. It’s a great way to communicate with your audience and connect with them by offering expert knowledge and entertainment through fun, creative content.
When it comes to video, remember to repurpose. Repurposing a video interview to text or to audio is a great way to get more mileage out of your video content (and it’s super easy). Likewise, if you have a great piece of text content, try having a dynamic person in your organization present it in video format.
YouTube and Vimeo both offer the ability for users to create branded channels where you can upload your video content. Both channels will allow you to set custom background images to further reinforce branding and optimize the channel to link back to your website.
The beauty of promotion and distribution is that they can easy work together to accomplish your set content marketing goals. Promotion is all about creating excitement and engagement around your content – distribution is a matter of publishing content through different channels and getting your content to appear in the search results. With any content marketing strategy, utilize a blend of both practices to ensure maximum exposure for your content.
