7 Marketing Tips That Boost Social Media Content Creation

Over the years, there has been a lot of confusion about whether social media content creation helps boost search engine rankings. This confusion has caused many businesses to either forgo social media marketing entirely or to scale back on their efforts. But doing either could be a mistake, as social media can help you improve your content and offer more value to your audience.

Does social media content creation play a part in Google rankings? Although it might not directly affect them, there are so many benefits of using social media to supplement your blog posts and website content. We’ll show you why it’s important and seven ways you can improve your social media content plan.

How Can You Use Social Media To Improve the Content You’re Already Creating?

There is good reason why a blog service may offer social media content in conjunction with blogging: Content and social media work together to maximize the value you can deliver to your audience.

A problem that many companies face is brand awareness. Social media content creation can remedy this. Your goal is to reach your target audience, and you can do this through the social media platforms they use.

Social media platforms are great places to create connections with readers, expand your customer pool and build your brand image and voice. If you’ve implemented a content marketing plan, social media gives you another channel to reach readers. You can share links to blog posts you’ve already created as well as create original content for social media users to digest.

While there are many ways you can use social media to complement your articles, we’re going to discuss the seven most impactful ways it can improve your content marketing efforts. Hold on tight, these social media content creation tips can make the difference in your marketing strategy.

1. Get To Know Your Target Audience … Like, Really Know Them

When it comes to understanding one’s target audience, most brands only scratch the surface. If you’re not using social media, you fall in with “most brands,” but you can easily remedy that.

Social media content creation can help you dig deeper and allow you to get to know your customers on a whole new and intimate level. From giving you a better understanding of consumers’ online activity to informing you of what type of content they want to see (and which they can do without), social media can allow you to gain insight into the daily lives of your customers — something neither your blog nor your website can help you do.

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To truly benefit from a social media content plan, though, you need to do much more than post. You need to put on your sleuthing cap and come up with answers to the following questions:

• What types of content does your audience like?
• What kinds of content do they not like?
• When are your customers most active online?
• Where are your customers most active?
• When are your customers most active online?
• What other brands do they follow and interact with?

Use the answers you come up with to guide your social media content creation and marketing efforts. For example, maybe you’ve been ordering batches of short articles that briefly touch on a variety of topics, but your audience shares more in-depth pieces from your competitors. Instead of ordering ten 500-word articles per week from your blog service, request two lengthy pieces (at least 2,000 words each) that dive deep into a topic in which your audience has expressed interest.

Benefits of Knowing Your Audience

Monitoring your audience’s social media activity can also help your social media content creation strategy. This information can help you structure posts so that they’re more shareable.

For instance, you may be in the habit of sharing a short blurb or two from each article. However, your audience may respond better to intriguing headlines. You can use this information to ask your blog content writing services to generate more clickable titles. For example, instead of titling your article, 10 Energy-Efficient Solutions for Your Home, consider something more exciting, such as 10 Easy Changes You Can Make To Save Money on Your Energy Bill.

These are just a few examples of how you can use social media content creation to improve your blogging efforts, but you get the picture.

2. Listen to Your Audience

When on social media, put your ear to the ground to really listen to what your audience has to say. What are they talking about? What questions are they asking? When they talk about your brand, what are they saying? What information are they looking for?  Social listening can serve you well in a number of ways, but one way we want to talk about is topic creation.

By monitoring your followers’ conversations, you can get to know their pain points, desires and interests. You can use this information to generate more relevant topics that are centered around more relevant keywords.

Say, for example, that you sell landscaping services. You may have thought all along that your customers hire you because they want attractive lawns. Based on their likes, shares and comments, however, you discover that they’re really just looking for ways to save time. Use this insight to shift your focus from creating content on landscaping best practices to creating content about how landscaping services can save homeowners time.

Another way to generate topics for your social media content creation is by simply asking your audience what type of content they want to see. Polls have made it easier than ever for brands to do this while allowing individuals to remain anonymous. In addition to generating topics, polls are a great way to show your followers that you truly value their input.

3. Use Hashtags To Identify Your Keywords and Vice Versa

Thanks to hashtags, keyword research doesn’t have to be so hard. In fact, it may be as simple as scrolling through Twitter.

To find out what your audience is talking about today, go through your feed to see which hashtags your followers are using to talk about both your industry and their own lives. Let’s use your faux landscaping company as an example again.

According to Top-Hashtags, #landscape is the most popular hashtag used to discuss landscaping. However, because it’s number one, you want to avoid it in your social media content creation. Why? Everyone’s using it. Though your article will pop up when a person types in #landscape, so will thousands of others. To set your post apart, try using #LandScapeStyles and #NatureLandscape, the second and third most popular landscaping hashtags. Ask your blog content writing services to use these phrases as keywords as well to ensure your blog pops up in the SERPs for related queries.

Don’t just stop with industry-related hashtags, though. See what else your audience is talking about. Are they talking about summer? Consider using “summer” as a keyword and a hashtag.

#Summer

#SummerLandscaping

#SummerRetreat

Are your followers itching to get away during COVID-19? Build an article around popular COVID hashtags, such as #QuarantineandChill, #Inspiration, #PlayIdeas and #StayHealthy.

Your article can focus on finding inspiration in one’s yard during these times, or on building a backyard retreat with landscaping services. You get the idea.

4. Identify Top-Performing Content

Although social media content creation is important, so is analyzing, optimizing and learning from your past posts. You should be identifying top-performing content across all platforms, and not just social media. However, social media makes it easy for brands to gauge the performance of content, as it literally counts engagement for you and then presents you with the data.

For instance, you can scroll through your feed right now to see that your article about how gardening boosts mental health garnered 98 Likes and 22 Shares, but that your post about landscape design only netted 2 Likes and 0 Shares. Of course, you should use the analytics tools on each social platform to gain a complete understanding of how your audience interacts with your content, but a brief scroll can yield significant insight when you’re in a hurry.

That said, the data won’t help you if you don’t do anything with it. Once you identify your best- and worst-performing content, take the info to your blog writers. Request social media content creation that is more in line with what your audience likes to see rather than wasting resources on developing content you think it should see.

5. Identify Your Competitors’ Top Performing Content

Industry leaders don’t become industry leaders by minding their own business. Rather, they’re constantly watching what their competitors are doing, and then they go out and do it better.

Social media has made it easier than ever for brands to keep tabs on one another. Review your competitors’ feeds at least once a week to see what type of content they’re posting and, more importantly, how their followers react to it. Your sleuthing may reveal topics or perspectives you’ve never considered before and may want to order from your blog content writing services, or it may show you what NOT to do. Either way, competitor insight can also advise your social media content creation strategy.

6. Integrate Social Share Buttons

When it comes to your overall content marketing strategy, social share buttons are probably an afterthought. While this is the normal attitude toward these little icons, social share buttons are one of those elements that can mean the difference between your blog’s success and its irrelevance.

By adding these buttons, you’re inviting readers to share content they like and to talk about your brand. In essence, you’re inviting readers to do the social media content creation and marketing for you. And this type of marketing — which is equivalent to traditional word-of-mouth — is the best type of marketing.

The good news is that adding social share buttons to your blog is a simple yet impactful way to optimize your content marketing efforts. We’ll let Social Media Week get into the “how” of placement, but the tips it touches on are as follows:

• Placement is key, as where you put them can make or break their effectiveness.
• Opt for custom buttons to help them stand out, but don’t make them look foreign.
• Only include share buttons for platforms your audience uses. If they’re not on LinkedIn, ditch it.
• Track the use of your buttons. If they’re not being used, try different positions, or lose them entirely.

7. Make Your Content More Digestible

The average person spends seven seconds reading a blog post. Seriously. Seven seconds.

Though the reasons for this (admittedly depressing) statistic vary, the most common one is that most readers simply want to gain a few takeaways. You can make things easier on your audience by using social media content creation to break up lengthy or complex content.

So, let’s say facilities management software is the topic. Though the information the article contains can help businesses reduce costs and increase productivity, the article itself is probably complex and, for lack of a better word, boring. Social media can help you deliver the same information but in a more digestible and engaging manner. Some ideas to help you break your single blog asset into several content assets are as follows:

• Create a single video that briefly covers what the article talks about.
• Create several other videos that cover each section of your article.
• Share interesting snippets of your article.
• Create an infographic that covers the article’s main points.
• Create a gif. (We promise, there is such a thing as an educational gif.)

The goal is to share your content in multiple ways so that it can be consumed by multiple people with varying preferences.

Make Social Media Content Creation Easier

Content is an investment, so you might as well make the most of it by pairing the articles you receive from your copywriter with corresponding social media content. Your blog writers are the best people to create both types of content, as they’re familiar with your brand and can ensure consistency in voice and topic between each content asset.

If you’re already using our blog service, talk to your account manager about adding social media content to your next order. If you’re not yet using a blogging service, make today the day you change that. Hire professional writers to focus on social media content creation and other content for your marketing strategy. Contact our team today to get connected with the best copywriter for your unique needs.