If your brand’s social media and content marketing strategy have been operating independently of each other, you’ve probably been thinking about changing that relationship. If you’re planning to integrate the two, you’re making a smart move that will amplify the power of both.
Integrating social media into your brand’s content marketing strategy means aiming for synergy among the different elements as each works to boost the other. For example, a best-case scenario is when social media posts, tweets and videos boost and reinforce email and blog content marketing, and vice versa. Think of it as one big happy family singing the praises of each other.
The Benefits
When you grow your brand’s following on different social media channels, you’re growing your audience by leaps and bounds. But that’s just one of the benefits you get from social media content marketing. Other key benefits of integrating social media into a content marketing strategy include:
It Drives Traffic to Your Website
Compelling social media posts pique your followers’ interest, driving them to your website to learn more about your products and services.
It Increases Brand Awareness
Social media is designed for sharing, so when your followers share your posts with friends, family or co-workers, they’re boosting awareness of your brand. As the sharing continues, awareness of your brand keeps spreading exponentially.
It Grows Leads
When social media drives interested consumers to your website for more information, it gives you an opportunity to capture their data. These interested consumers then become your brand’s new leads.
It Boosts Conversions
The ideal conversions brands strive for are usually sales. Social media can get followers excited about your products so that they’re ready to buy them. Some influencers have such powerful sway over their devoted followers that their audience will purchase whatever the influencer endorses on social media.
It Grows and Strengthens Brand Loyalty
A strong, engaged social media presence also boosts brand loyalty because it shows customers that you understand and value them. If you work with social influencers, the trust that their followers place in them transfers to your brand.
Tips for Integrating Social Media Into a Content Marketing Strategy
Follow these tried-and-tested tips brands and marketers use to successfully integrate your social media with your content marketing strategy. Here are some of the best ways to get the most out of combining social media with content marketing:
Align Brand Identity and Social Media
It’s important to align the mission and goals of your social media marketing with those of your content marketing strategy. You’ll also want to be consistent with your brand identity.
That means that everything you post on social media should reflect the way your brand looks and sounds. It should represent your brand’s values too. So, for example, if you work with social-media influencers, you should carefully vet them to make sure their image is consistent with your brand.
Optimize Content For Search
Make sure that you optimize your social media content for search so that it can drive traffic to your website. But Google search isn’t the only way people find content they’re interested in online. It might come as a surprise, but after Google, YouTube is the second-most-popular way consumers search online. So it’s important to have a substantial presence on that video-oriented social media channel too.
Promote Your Social Media Content
It might seem obvious, but it can be easy to overlook. Don’t forget to promote your social media content with social media content marketing. Let your blog, site and e-newsletter audience know about your brand’s social media presence and the exciting content they can find there.
One way to amplify this strategy is by including the ability for social media sharing of your email content within your email marketing. It’s all about getting views, clicks and engagement with the social media content by spreading the word about it.
Use Social Media Engagement for Market and Content Research
Ask your social media followers what they like about your products or services and any novel ways that they use them. You’ll learn more about your target market and what they’re looking for. It’s info that comes in handy when you’re developing new products and updating current ones. And it’s also the sort of valuable information you can transform into blog, website or e-newsletter content and use to shape your ad messages.
Use Social Media to Boost Your Email Marketing
Use your social media posts to encourage your target market to sign up for more information about your products. It can be an effective way to grow leads because it boosts your email list and e-newsletter readership.
Use Social Media to Create Buzz About Events
Don’t limit product launch content to your website or ads. Give careful consideration to working with relevant influencers, who can create buzz about your product-launch events on social media. Consider partnering with them on other social media strategies like contests and giveaways too.
Use Social Listening
Use social listening to see who’s mentioning your product and topics relevant to it on social media and where they’re commenting. You’ll want your brand to have a strong presence on those channels so you can engage with your audience.
You can also find some of your best customers through social listening. You might think about working with some of the most enthusiastic customers as brand ambassadors or social media influencers.
Track Your Social Media Results
Keep track of the social media content that brings the best results. Doing so will put you on the right track to creating even more valuable content that resonates with your audience.
Google Analytics can give you the data you need about the content that’s performing the best, whether it’s on social media or your website. It also can provide you with important demographic details about your audience, which can help you discover new markets to target. Google Analytics can also tell you where your traffic is coming from and compare it to your competitors’ traffic.
Repurpose Content
You can attract more followers by repurposing relevant content for social media channels. For example, you might find that certain blog posts are or easily can be tailor-made for repurposing on a variety of social media channels. Some content might lend itself to videos on YouTube, while other content might work better on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter with a few tweaks.
Enable Easy Communication and Collaboration
To maintain brand consistency and keep everyone on the same page, make communication between your social media and other content teams easy. Social media tools like HootSuite can make collaboration between teams easier and let everyone know what’s going on with content.
You can use social media tools to establish an editorial calendar that will help with overall content planning. An editorial calendar lets you get ahead of the game and keep organized. One key benefit it helps you plan far in advance is the content your brand wants to create for holidays and special events like sales.
