Social Media and Content Marketing: Why They Must Share the Same DNA

• Updated on: 2020-10-07
• Read original article here

Social media plays a prominent role in content marketing. It’s a vital channel to distribute content. Using social media and content marketing, you can build brand awareness, foster engagement, and drive followers to your website for conversions. In creating a social media marketing strategy, it needs to align with your content marketing strategy.

But how do you maintain consistency and integrate these two strategies? Let’s dive deep into how.

It’s not enough just to have profiles for your brand on social media platforms. You have to engage, delight, respond, and share valuable information. Why? Because social media is where your audience looks for solutions. We know this because 3.96 billion people use social media, and 54 percent of social browsers use social media to research products.

Most businesses see the opportunity here and are investing more into their social media efforts. An investment in social media isn’t just about promoting content or running ads. Rather, it’s more about having dedicated resources that have a defined strategy for each network, consistently publish content, and interact with audiences. Having authentic conversations with prospects on social media by educating them with your content is a proven way to drive conversions.

A good first move to align social media and content marketing is to review your current content strategy. In your content strategy, you’ve defined:

Of these elements, several are relevant to social media. Your business goals should be the same. For example, if your goal is to increase website visits, leverage social media to be a referrer to your site.

Target audiences matter as well because you’ll be seeking out those that match your buyer on social media. The type of targeting you can do depends on the platform, but you can typically use industry, roles, and interests.

Voice and tone are important in everything you craft. The tone of your content might change depending on the platform. On Twitter, for instance, you’ll use a conversational, concise style.

Distribution is an essential role of social media. While you don’t own social media channels, you do have the ability to decide how to use it to disperse your content.

Finally, measurement is just as crucial for social media as for content marketing. Metrics to consider tracking include:

After you’ve reviewed your current strategy, including social media, you need to revisit goals and tactics. If you have documented these already, that’s great. It’s simply time to review them. If you’ve been using social media without a compass, you should map out the elements noted above.

You’ll need to answer several questions to start. These answers assist you in achieving that alignment between social media and content marketing.

Across all the social media sites, you should develop fundamental goals. Some popular ones are engagement, community building, traffic, awareness, and monetization.

There are so many unique platforms for social media. Some are mature; others are emerging. Choose the profiles that make the most sense for your industry and audience. Then align those with goals. For example, Facebook — which is still the platform with the most users — makes sense for most brands, and is just as important for B2B as it is for B2C organizations.

Using Facebook can help hit goals around awareness, engagement, traffic, and community building. Whereas Instagram is great for awareness and engagement, it’s harder for it to be a traffic referral source because there’s no linking on posts.

Looking back at the metrics above, you may choose to measure all of these things or only a few. Decide which ones correlate with your goals. Social share of voice is a good metric to use if your competitors have highly optimized social media. If not, then it may not be very useful.

In this process of revamping your social media channel, it’s also a good idea to audit what you have now. This is true for brands with and without an existing strategy. Analyze aspects of your profiles and optimize them:

You’ve now completed your social media and content marketing journey. It’s time to take what you learned and develop this into strategies. The most crucial action to take now is to build a social media content calendar. It should include all the same aspects as your master content calendar.

The calendar allows you to plan posts and meet posting frequency goals. It’s also a transparent way to provide visibility to all content stakeholders on what’s happening on each profile every day. See how it works in DivvyHQ’s platform below.

If you need help developing a schedule for your calendar, download the social media schedule template today for free!