You’re probably wondering why you need to set up social media accounts when this guide is about creating a 30-day content marketing plan. The answer is because social media is one of the best tools you can use to help amplify your content marketing strategy.
If you wait for people to discover your content on search engines or on other people’s blogs, then you could be waiting a long time. With social media, on the other hand, you can quickly get the word out about your brand or your business.
Imagine if your content gets shared among thousands, or even millions, of people! That would be fantastic for your business!
There are many different strategies you can use, depending on the platform, but the main idea is that you can be proactive and reach out to your target users.
You can let your audience know you exist and that you can address their pain points. You can quickly build a following or a fan base for your brand, especially if you do your targeting correctly and put the right content in front of them.
Having a solid social media presence will also help increase your trustworthiness. You can even use it as a customer service platform so everyone can see how you conduct your business (yes, this means you need to put your best foot forward, always).
Another reason why social media is a perfect tool to complement your content marketing strategy is that it sends social signals to Google. The more positive signals you give off, the better it will be for your site’s SEO.
You can also build backlinks to your site from various social platforms, so that’s another plus for your brand’s SEO.
Now, the thing is there are plenty of social media sites. Which ones should you target?
For starters, you should focus on where your target audience hangs out. This usually means the biggest platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit, Quora, and SlideShare.
Of course, if you’re a solopreneur, you may not have time to manage all these platforms. But, if you can manage your time wisely, it can be done. Ideally, however, you want someone to focus on your social media properties as it can skyrocket your brand’s growth like no other!
When choosing the right social platform for your brand, you need to recall your content marketing goals. Make sure your social media and content goals are aligned, so you’re essentially working towards one goal. You want to make the best use of your time, so planning the cohesiveness of your entire digital marketing strategy is necessary.
Whatever your content and social media goals are, you still need to remember the importance of branding. This means you shouldn’t just use unrelated images and graphics on your social profiles, or maybe even use a different name for each platform.
If you do that people are going to get confused, they’re going to ask themselves if you’re the real brand or an impostor or something along those lines!
So, to make sure people recognize you wherever they go, use your brand name, your logo, and your company colors on all your profiles. Look up how you can make the most of each platform and use that information to fuel your growth.
Over the next week, you’ll be working on the content that you can use to populate your social media accounts.
For now, however, you can either leave your account blank (save for your profile details obviously), or you can start writing some of your thoughts down. Maybe you’d like to write a few lines introducing your business.
No one’s probably going to see your new social media accounts yet, so don’t feel too uncomfortable about having relatively blank accounts for now. In just a few days, you’ll have a ton of content ready for social media! In the next post we will look at repurposing your content.