Consumers visit social channels for entertainment, to get information, to gain status by access or comprehension of posted information, and to socialize. Simply plugging a brand or product into social channels is not going to be effective. Too many social marketing efforts fail to recognize the vital importance of posting content that people actually care about.
Here are the five reasons your social marketing efforts need to be built around quality content.
Content makes people like you, or follow you, or +1 you, depending on the social platform. Content makes you popular on social networks. Here’s a thought experiment. Take two opposites to their logical extremes to see where they lead. “Bill” is all over numerous social media platforms. He has accounts with channels you’ve never heard of. “Tom,” however, is only on Twitter. Every day, Tom tweets, links to articles he and others in his space wrote, and occasionally posts something extra like a link to a video, for instance. Bill never posts anything, he just Likes everyone and gets them to like him back. Which of the two gets more real, useful, active engagement? The idea isn’t that doing something is better than doing nothing. Bill’s doing something. He’s amassing a large following of strangers who don’t care about him. Tom isn’t asking people to like him, he’s giving them a reason to. Content is what people go on social media sites to look for.
For example, when you go on Facebook, you’re looking for what your friends and family have posted; that’s content. They will often have posted videos, images, and links to other sites and articles. In other words, people access social media sites to post and consume content.
Content is what people go on social media sites to look for.
Social channels are crowded places. There are about 1.1 billion users on Facebook, and between 300 million and 540 million on Google+, depending on how they’re counted. The idea of getting through to people in a maelstrom like that is difficult. You need tightly focused efforts that allow two-way interaction right from the start, before people begin interacting with you. The process starts when someone begins searching for someone like you in your space. You need to be findable.
Content makes you findable because it’s what people are looking for in the first place. In searches outside social channels, content increases search engine rankings, making you more immediately findable. With social media, content makes you findable because it identifies you and because it makes you involved in the conversations that are already happening.
Every piece of content you publish is a contribution to a conversation your prospects are already having, or an invitation to join it. Great content goes viral, spreading across social channels in a way that “buy our stuff” never could. No one wants to share sales messages with their friends, but great content that’s worth sharing is what people use social media for in the first place.
Trust in advertising is at an all-time low — and it wasn’t high to begin with. Nielsen research indicates a 90/10 split with 90 percent of respondents trusting recommendations from their friends and families, or from users they trusted online — a key point for online marketers. Of the same group, only 33 percent trusted messages from display advertising. On more than one level, people just aren’t buying it.
But content marketing isn’t a way of carrying out traditional advertising online. It’s not about shouting at people, it’s about talking with them. Content marketing is how you become the “word of mouth” that people trust.
There’s more to it than that. Even at the business-to-business level, content marketing is more effective than traditional marketing. Roper Public Affairs found that 80 percent of business decision makers prefer to get company information from a series of articles, rather than an advertisement.
People who care about a subject want to hear stories about it, and as social media becomes more searchable by hashtags, these stories are easier to find. When people find the stories you wrote about their subject of interest, they’ll want to interact with your brand and they’ll form a positive opinion of you. They’ll remember you, not by your catchy slogans, but by being their go-to source for information about a subject that matters to them. When they want to make a purchase in your space, the context of their decision will be formed by your content.
Setting up a social strategy around content marketing allows you to begin a self-stoking cycle, where your content will be the beginning of word-of-mouth recommendation of the content, leading people back to your brand’s social presence. You’ll benefit from fan and advocate communities, from earned media, and from user generated content. Encouraging fans to offer their own content is one of the most effective forms of content marketing on social media. Look at Ford’s Fiesta Movement, Burberry’s Art of the Trench, or the Guardian newspaper’s Own the Weekend, for example. It’s that engagement with your content and thus your brand that drives social media purchases.
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