Companies and content marketers need to start taking social media seriously and become active in the various social networks related to the audience in their industry. Brands that can build a following by being genuinely interesting and posting engaging, entertaining and relevant content create far more opportunities for themselves to sell to consumers.

Facebook

Today, Facebook hosts over 1.3 billion users worldwide; 50 percent of those users, according to Facebook, are online at any given time sharing one million links every 20 minutes. Primarily, the site is about networking with friends, and the average user has about 130 friends. As you can imagine, the platform offers endless promotional opportunities for your content.

Beyond the networking of friends, the site has had a huge amount of success with platform applications. Ranging from games to contests to promotions targeted to the user’s profile, Facebook claims that more than 70 percent of its users engage with a variety of applications.

Getting Started

The first step is to create a Facebook Page for brands and companies. Using a personal Profile as a business presence is frowned upon, and Groups have limited functionality as marketing platforms.

There are three main locations on the site that you can choose to display your advertised content:

• Newsfeed: The most popular of the Facebook advertising placements, these ads show up seamlessly in a user’s feed along with the content that they see from their friends and the people that they follow.

• Mobile: Earlier this year, Facebook stated that there were 1.01 billion mobile monthly active users on the social network – that is a crazy amount of people. If your content is optimized for mobile, this is an avenue that can greatly enhance your content’s visibility.

• Right-Hand Column: This placement can be seen below the “Trending” topics section. The benefit of this placement is that the ad will move down as the user scrolls through their feed.

You can also share exclusive discounts, promotions, or information through your Facebook posts to encourage followers to act fast! Depending on your industry, try offering special deals or discounts to your followers to keep them interested.

Even if they do not immediately buy or use your service, they will keep your brand in mind and search for your brand in the future. As you gain new followers or clients, reward them by providing exclusive information about your industry. For example, promote an in-depth free guide through Facebook and get those new followers further down the sales funnel.

Audience Insights

It might sound obvious, but the more you know about your audience, the more effective your storytelling. With Facebook’s Audience Insights, you can measure which type of content is resonating with your Facebook followers. The tool is designed to help marketers learn more about their target audiences in order to create better content for the future. You can collect anonymous information such as:

• Demographics: Age and gender, lifestyle, education, relationship status, job role and household size.

• Page likes: The top Pages people like in different categories, like women’s apparel or sports.

• Location and language: Where do people live, and what languages do they speak.

• Facebook usage: How frequently are people in your target audience logging onto Facebook and what device(s) they are using when they log on.

• Purchases activity: Past purchase behavior (i.e. heavy buyers of women’s apparel) and purchase methods (i.e., in-store, online).

Advertising on Facebook allows you to reach one of the largest audiences in the world; never before have we been able to reach such a massive following with such accuracy and relevance.

Twitter

Similar to Facebook, twitter has a massive network with over 500 million users. The network acts as an efficient tool that improves communication and allows its users to closely interact with their favorite brands.

Twitter can be a great platform for promoting content and, subsequently, your business. The primary application for Twitter is to keep followers informed about the cool products and services that your business can provide. The secondary application is to actively engage the phenomenon of crowd-sourcing.

By searching for industry-related keywords or phrases, you can discover specific trends, uncover frequently asked questions and monitor what your competitors are offering. While delivering valuable information in small doses, you can effectively build your client base and connect with a broader audience.

Promoted Tweets

Promoted tweets are similar to organic tweets because they can be retweeted, replied to and favorited by anyone. Keep in mind that Twitter clearly identifies promoted tweets, so there will be no surprises to viewers. Promoted tweets can include links to websites, hashtags and various content mediums. You can also promote tweets that were originally published organically. However, be aware that only one promoted tweet will appear in a user’s timeline at any given time and can appear in any of the following places:

• Home timelines
• At the top of relevant search results
• Search results for promoted trends
• On Twitter’s official desktop or mobile clients like TweetDeck, Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android, among others
• Syndicated to some third-party Twitter clients like HootSuite

Promoted tweets allow you to tweet to specific users, during specific moments, even to non-followers. Promoted tweets can use interests, gender, location, language spoken, or device used to target the right audience for your content. It can even target by similarity to existing followers.

Similar to Facebook and Google, Twitter’s pricing system is based on bidding. Start by setting the maximum amount you’re willing to spend per follow or click and Twitter will give you suggestions for what you should bid to optimize your campaign. Twitter provides useful tools that allow you to see how each of your tweets is performing. After a few days of running promoted tweets, be sure to check back to gauge how the campaign is working to adjust and improve your efforts.

Hootsuite

HootSuite was originally created for improving Twitter engagement by optimizing and managing posts, but it also allows you to post from personal Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. This tool enables a brand to create a new post and send to any one, two or all of the connected social media accounts.

HootSuite’s main mission is to help schedule posts across many different social networks. Allowing anyone to easily plan ahead and actively engage with the most followers possible. Simply select the date and time, and let Hootsuite post that awesome content for you.

A bonus feature of HootSuite is their built-in URL shortener, which will also track important social metrics in the “Analytics” section. This means you can create full reports on engagement, clicks, and collective data – each for specific social accounts. This is an important promotional tool that can save time for any content marketer.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is established as the premier social networking site devoted solely to professionals. It is said that LinkedIn’s 277 million members include an executive from every Fortune 500 company. LinkedIn remains the best social networking site to market your business-to-business (B2B) products and services because of this special demographic.

Even for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, LinkedIn is important. Creating a branded LinkedIn profile has many benefits for your company such as showcasing your authoritative stance within the industry and allowing you to create sponsored updates for more effective content promotion.

Sponsored Updates

Similar to Facebook, LinkedIn created an ad unit called LinkedIn Sponsored Updates that puts promoted content in the newsfeeds of followers.

LinkedIn Sponsored Updates consist of a headline, description (up to 75 characters), your name or company name, small image and a URL. Currently, you can specify which LinkedIn members view your ads by selecting criteria such as job title, job function, industry, geography, age, gender, company name and more. Similar to Twitter and other social media networks that offer paid advertising, you set a maximum budget and only pay for the clicks or impressions that you receive.

Here are a few tips for effectively using this, and other promotion features, on LinkedIn:

• Share content of high value only: These include expert-level blog posts, eBooks, free guides or white papers. LinkedIn audiences generally prefer more substance in their content than a list or “top tips” blog post.

• Share content that has great images: You can’t upload an image with content you’re sharing on LinkedIn. Instead, you are limited to choosing one of the images on the page you’re sharing. Selecting an image on the shared page that will grab reader’s attention is essential to successful LinkedIn promotion.

• Don’t forget to target LinkedIn groups: While you can target based on location, title, and industry, LinkedIn groups get right to the heart of what people are most interested in. Groups on Google Plus are similar to “liking” a Facebook page.

According to LinkedIn, the best performing ads are relevant to the target audience and written with clear, compelling words. LinkedIn suggests that you highlight special offers, unique benefits, white papers, free trials or demos to get people’s attention. They also recommend that you include strong call-to-action phrases like “Try,” “Download,” “Sign up” or “Request a quote.”

Pinterest

As we know, Pinterest is one of the founders of photo album-style content sharing that has blown up over the past five-to-ten years. Content marketers quickly discovered the advantages of this photo distribution channel when promoting content; not only can you drastically raise the visibility of the content, but also encourage it to be shared to an even bigger audience.

Once you create a branded profile on Pinterest, be sure to add Pin It! buttons that appear when a user hovers over an image (keep in mind these don’t function on mobile browsers) and Pin It! share buttons that appear below all the images on your website. This will encourage people to pin your content for you, spread your content around Pinterest and drive traffic back to your site. It will also encourage visitors on your website to start following you on Pinterest for more content.

Here’s a quick tip for increased brand recognition: add a small branded logo to the corner of all your images. This is a small and subtle addition to your pins that can amplify your brand name tremendously.

Instagram

Instagram is quickly becoming a content marketer’s best friend. Instagram has 150 million monthly active users who post and share 55 million images or videos per day – that is a massive audience that brands can no longer afford to ignore. Instagram is no stranger to brand engagement, with over 70 percent of top brands using it and roughly one out of five brands posting once a day.

#hashtags

In case you haven’t heard – those #hashtags are actually important. In fact, over 80 percent of Instagram posts by top brands include at least one hashtag. To get a sense of what the Instagram community is interested in, check out their list of trending hashtags.

Integrating hashtags in your posts is an important way to attract new followers but use them cleverly. As with most of life, moderation is best. Use related hashtags for content discovery but don’t overdo it. One-to-three hashtags is a good rule of thumb.

Branded social media profiles have been a proven marketing tool for a few years now, so if your brand has not built a presence through the various available channels you are already falling behind. Not only can social media help gather a larger following and boost traffic, it can directly influence leads and conversion rates for companies in any industry.

The post Using Branded Social Media Profiles to Promote Content appeared first on Relevance.

Generate a Buzz around the Content with Social Media

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+.

Facebook

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.

Twitter

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.

Google +

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.

Publicize Stellar Content

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.

Reuse Existing Content

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:

Written 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.

Images

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.

Videos

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.

The post Blending Content Promotion and Distribution for Marketing Success appeared first on Relevance.

But in order to start tracking the success of content (and guide future efforts) you need a content marketing strategy with specific objectives. By implementing objectives or goals, you’ll be able to determine what makes great content within your industry. Your team can then make the necessary adjustments along the way to improve an effective formula.

To start, let’s highlight some broad goals that should be used as a starting point for any business. Successful content should:

• Improve your brand awareness
• Attract more traffic to your site
• Generate new customer leads and/or sales
• Develop your online reputation
• Boost Audience Engagement
• Encourage natural links and optimize search engine ranking
• Benefit your competitive advantage

Moving forward, when you produce any single content piece, it should accomplish one or more of these goals, and your entire content portfolio should accomplish all of them.

Reaching Goals with Great Content

With any marketing strategy, accurately measuring and tracking efforts against targets and goals is essential in proving ROI. Content marketing is no different. When specific goals are set in place, the measurement of different metrics will be easier to track – making your content marketing strategy more effective.

Though there are many different tools available to measure the value of your content; most website owners utilize Google Analytics to effectively measure their content’s success. This tool offers a huge amount of useful data, but it can be difficult to choose which metrics to track.

Measuring Traffic and Time on Page

Every company wants more traffic to their site, but traffic alone is not a great indicator of content marketing success. If it’s coupled with other metrics, however, it can be particularly insightful.

Companies new to content marketing want their content (or brand) to show up in the search results. The problem is that they limit the measurable objectives for their content by focusing on traffic alone. Getting a lot of traffic doesn’t mean obtaining leads or loyal customers. Yes, you want users to visit your site, but there is much more to be measured that can improve your content marketing strategy.

In order to use traffic volume as a way to measure content marketing success, be sure to compare pages of similar content to each other, as all website pages are not created equal. For example, the home page of most websites will probably be one of the most visited pages on the site — but this isn’t always due to the content found there; basic SEO and promotional strategies can usually be credited with high traffic to the homepage.

Another metric to consider is the Time on Page. When the average time on a particular page is much higher than your site-wide average, it suggests that this page is grabbing and keeping visitors’ attention more than other pages, indicating that the content there is worth analyzing to see what additional insights it might provide.

This can tell you a lot about what type of topics your followers are interested in, or what type of content they might be searching for. That information can be extremely valuable in the future when producing new quality content for your audience. Take this knowledge and use it to create content that will establish your brand as a thought leader in the industry. Build trust and turn that into prospective leads and new customers.

How to Measure Referral Traffic

So what is referral traffic and how is it different from “regular” traffic?

Referral traffic is a bit more specific; this metric shows the visits to your website or content that originally came from an outside source. In other words, if a visitor clicks on a link from Facebook or Twitter and it leads to your website, that is considered a referral traffic or a referred visit.

Measuring referral traffic in Google Analytics can be done by selecting it as a Traffic Source:

With any content marketing strategy, you should have some content promotion and/or distribution in place to get that awe-inspiring content in front of your targeted audience.  If the content is valuable, people will share, like, or tweet your content on their own. As you create better content, it gets shared more often and will likely result in more referral traffic.

Referral traffic can be a sign of promotional and distributional effectiveness because it provides insight on which sites are referring the most traffic and the timing of the traffic being referred. Use this information to drill down on which distribution or social network channels you use to promote the content.

Measuring your Content Downloads

A frequent exercise in content marketing is to create downloadable content, such as free guides, whitepapers, mobile apps, or PDF’s. A great idea is to keep these downloadable content pieces behind a gated link — meaning visitors must fill out a contact form in order to gain access to the desired content.

Other times, visitors may not provide any additional information but still be required to download the content (e.g. large PDF documents, extensive resource pages, or even longer videos). In those cases, it is necessary to set up Event Tracking in Google Analytics to capture the incidence of your content being downloaded.

Once event tracking is set up, establish an event goal to track specific downloaded content pieces. When setting up your event goal in Google Analytics, you must set conditions for the goal and then specify a category, action, label, and value. In the case of measuring downloads, the event will be the act of downloading the content piece.

After the event goal is set up, you will be able to find the number of people who are actually downloading your content, without requiring any additional contact information from your visitors. This data can be used in conjunction with other metrics (like page views and time on page) to measure the success of your content.

Defining Your Content Marketing Success

At the beginning steps of any content marketing strategy, it’s absolutely vital to have a defined stance on what success looks like for you and your business. Success in content marketing will always be goal-oriented. As stated earlier, you need to establish clear, measurable objectives and then use various analytics to compare production vs. objective.

• Define what success means for your content and how you will measure it.
• Establish a timetable for measuring and using web analytics to gather data on the activity on your site.
• Use analytic data to adapt future content for optimal performance.

Every goal should include measurable milestones so that you can clearly see whether or not you’ve been successful in your content marketing efforts. This allows you to further articulate your goals so that they are clearly established; make them as specific as possible.

If your goal is to increase traffic to the site, you could specifically set the benchmark “Show a 20% increase in traffic to our ‘Contact Us’ page in 12 months.” This precise goal identifies what area of your site you’ll focus on, provides a firm definition of the traffic increase you’re looking to achieve, and it establishes a deadline at which you will measure to determine the content’s success.

Whatever your goals may be – from measuring overall traffic and time-on-page to conversions, referral traffic and more – Google Analytics provides a robust amount of information that can be used to measure content marketing success. And obviously, tracking your conversion goals will be the most important metric as that shows how much of that traffic or downloads lead to a sale.

Through this measurement, you can focus on the kinds of content that have generally worked for you and your competitors. With these analytics, you have the ability to adapt your content marketing strategy toward success and not waste time producing content that doesn’t have a chance.

The post Metrics to Measure: What Makes Great Content? appeared first on Relevance.