Social media marketing means promoting your website through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks. This is a highly effective way to build fans, to interact with your visitors and to gain more visitors to your site.
Content marketing, on the other hand, means adding blog posts and articles to your website so that you can demonstrate your knowledge on a given subject so that you can gain subscribers who will come back regularly to your website and so that you can fill your site with content for Google to find.
But these two strategies should not be thought of as separate and disparate things. Instead, you should think of them as one overarching approach. There is a lot of synergies to be had between social media and content marketing and when you understand this, you can massively grow your traffic.
Writing for Your Audience
The most obvious way in which social media and content marketing go hand in hand is in the fact that you’ll probably be sharing your content to your social media channels. Either manually or automatically, you should post on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere each time you create a new article and upload it.
What’s more, you should also look for specific communities on social media. This might mean joining a Facebook group, it might mean joining a Google+ community, or it might mean using social bookmarking sites like Reddit.
But instead of making this an afterthought, you should go one step further and make this the starting point when coming up with your content.
In other words, when you first set out to write any new article, you should ask yourself who it is for and where you’re going to share it. Only put the work into your blog post if you know that there’s a specific audience out there for it and that it’s going to be successful.
An article on Bruce Lee will be highly popular for instance if you share it to a Bruce Lee Google+ community. Likewise, you can also use this strategy to reel in entirely new audience members. Combining different niches, for instance, is a great way to write something new and to get lots of hits. For instance, if you have a fitness website, you can write about fitness and martial arts and then submit that to martial arts groups. Or why not write about fitness for entrepreneurs and share this to entrepreneur groups?
Think of your angle and where you’re going to share your content before you release it. That way, you can guarantee ROI for the effort you put into your writing!
