6 Rules for Social Media and Content Marketing

With content marketing repeatedly being proven as one of the best ways to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined audience, it is important to know how to do it properly.

Recently, statistics show that social media sites are one of the best ways to reach audiences and attract interest from the public sphere. 

Taking this into account, it is important that content marketers know the correct way to go about publishing their content on social media sites. These simple tips will help to increase customer engagement and web traffic.

Have a goal for your content

It is important that you have a goal in mind for your content so that you know what you want to achieve from your post. For example, are you looking for leads? To nurture future prospects? Entertain people? Or just boost your ratings in Google?

Determining what outcomes you would like to achieve will help adapt your writing to fulfil this, as well as write the best content that you can.

Research your audience and your topic

As well as having a goal for your content, it is also important that you know who you are writing for. This will help you decide on the topic of your content, the material within it.

You should also investigate what else is being written for the audience you are planning to target, as this will mean you can see what the hot topic is right now. However, try to be original and bring a new angle to it.

Don’t fill it with too much jargon

There is no problem with getting a little bit technical with your content if you know your stuff, but filling your post with too much jargon will just turn most of your audience off as they may fail to grasp your key points and won’t want to spend time looking up every acronym.

Instead, make sure that you remember you are writing for humans – be a little conversational, make it entertaining. You can still get all the information you wanted in there, however you will have done this in a consumer-friendly way.

This is especially fitting for writing on social media, as users on sites such as Facebook and Twitter will only share your content if it has interested them.

Publish everywhere

It is, of course, essential that you post to the main places where your target audience consumes its content, (which you should be able to find from your industry and audience research). However, that still doesn’t mean you shouldn’t post in other areas you may not have thought about.

Even if you don’t think it is necessarily relevant, posting your material in as many places as possible will definitely improve traffic and you never know, you could reach a totally new audience than you had before.

Create multi-media

Written posts are great, however in today’s world, there is so much technology available, that it seems a shame to waste it.

Why not get creative and produce a video, a podcast, an infographic, or even a slide show which people can consume quickly if they don’t have time to read a full article. Or if you want to include words, why not do both?

Turn problems into content

There are always problems within every company, however if you have managed to overcome them, why not share it with your customers and future clients.

Writing things such as case studies, or even writing a post to answer frequently asked questions will show that you care about your customers, work hard to resolve issues and aren’t afraid to admit mistakes.