How Does Social Media Support Content Marketing

When you’re trying to promote your brand online it can be difficult to decide how to allocate resources. It’s easy to spend a lot of time wondering whether you should invest in content creation or social media marketing. The problem with this sort of thinking is that true success doesn’t come from choosing just one tool to use, it’s comes from combining multiple tools to achieve results that neither could achieve on its own.

Social media is a must-have if you want to make a name for yourself online.

If you want to engage with potential clients and customers online in this day and age then you need to be looking at social media. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are becoming more powerful with every day because they transcend platforms. Users on desktop computers, laptops, and smart devices are spending more and more time engaging with their social networks. It’s important to understand that “social media” is more than just a buzzword, its power is in the simple but powerful nature of these platforms. People are sharing content person to person, with recommendation coming from trusted friends, family members, and social media influencers. People are more likely to engage with content that is recommended by these sources rather than the faceless forces driving search engines.

Organic engagement requires quality content.

Social media is important. That much is clear. But many people have a hard time turning this basic understanding into results. Usually this is because they get fixated on social media on its own and decide that all they need is to pay for plenty of likes, shares, and other social tokens. The problem with this is that all the traffic in the world won’t lead to positive results unless the traffic isn’t leading to worthwhile content. If someone follows a link to a site that is devoid of content then they’re probably not going to come back and they definitely won’t be sharing the page of their own volition.

Your online presence will only truly take off when you start to get organic engagement. You can spend money on social media promotion to introduce your site to people but eventually you want visitors to start sharing your content willingly. If you have to pay for every hit your site gets then you’re not getting the best return on investment possible. Those first visits you might have to pay for should inspire visitors to share your content and create a loop that will propel you to success.

Properly combining social media and content creates a positive feedback loop.

If you want to understand success online you need to understand feedback loops. The term “feedback loop” refers to systems where one part of the system powers the next part of the system and it all ends up looping back so that it eventually drives itself forward. Here is the feedback loop that you want to achieve when promoting yourself online:

1. Social media drives traffic to your site
2. People like the content on the site so much that they share it on social media
3. The loop starts over

It’s a simple concept, but creating one of these loops requires a careful balance. If you focus all your effort on social media promotion then people will arrive on your site to find that there’s nothing worth sharing on it. This will leave you with a terrible return on investment because your active social media promotion won’t lead to the sort of organic engagement that you need for sustained growth. On the other hand, if you focus all your effort on content creation then you might end up with a great website that no one visits. If you want to see the best possible results you need to promote your brand while you promote content, ignoring either part will short circuit your loop and cost you.

Success online means finding the balance between content creation and promotion.

To promote your brand online you should start by creating compelling content and then promoting that content on social media. That’s the basic recipe but there’s no simple way to decide how you should divide your resources between these two elements. It takes time and experimentation to find the right balance between production and promotion that will get your feedback loop going.

This doesn’t mean that you have to flail around blindly as you start out. A lot of trouble can be avoided by calling in people who are experienced with online promotion to help find the perfect balance for your brand. Succeeding online isn’t just about throwing resources at the problem, it’s about investing them wisely so that you see the biggest return on investment possible.

Do you need help with social media and content for your brand? Contact a Brandsmen today for a free online audit to see how you are currently performing.