Social media can be a great way to let the world know your contents out there and can even be a source of referral traffic in its own right helping potential customers find you. But social media is still pretty new and many businesses have jumped into it without really knowing how to use it effectively.
Must Have Presence of Your Brand in Any Top Social Network:
The first thing you will need to do if you want a leverage social media to help get your content out there is to make sure that your company has a presence on at least the top social media networks. We are talking about the ones with the largest number of active users Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus and YouTube. Everyone on these networks is a chance to get your content in front of more eyeballs attract more links and encourage more sharing.
Integrate Share Buttons in Your Blog or Website:
Once you have established a presence on these networks you want to make sure that they are integrated on the pages that host the content you are creating. Lots of companies maintain a blog within an RSS feed because it is a great way to get the word out to qualified visitors their actively subscribing to your content. You can do a similar thing with social media by placing the various share buttons on your pages and these allow users to quickly pass on content they found useful to their own networks.
Be Careful ! Do Not Fill all Your Page With Social Buttons:
That said you want to choose your social share buttons carefully. Do not fill your pages with twenty different buttons that take two and a half days to load. You want to pick the ones that your audiences are active on. For example, if you have got a strong presence on Twitter and Google Plus make sure you put the Twitter and Google Plus buttons on your pages.
If you are trying to grow your Facebook or LinkedIn following placing those buttons there might be a good idea as well. But if you do not have a My Space page and you do not target users of those social networks you may want to leave those off and make it simpler for your consumer base to make their selection.
Keep in mind also that many of these share buttons are configurable. For example, you could optimise the default tweet to include your Twitter username to encourage recipients of that tweet to follow you. On Facebook you can control which image thumbnails to use as a default. As you build and grow your presence on social networks you will find topics that you relate that are guiding conversations in the social sphere.
On Twitter and Google plus hash tags are commonly used to tag certain conversations and people that are interested in those knows topics can choose to listen to tweets are posts that contain specific hash tags. You can find existing has tags by searching key words on Twitter about your industry or by following influences that tweet regularly and seeing which has tags they use. For example the web analytics community uses the hash tag measure in their tweets.
Many of the experts conversant shared interest in content with one another using this hashed act. So if you are creating content that fits the bill you can use that has tried to get your content in front of a very specific group of people. Remember though this is a self regulating community, your content must be useful and valuable to that group and if it is you will be rewarded with further shares and re-tweets.
A good thing to do when planning your content strategy is to identify how you plan to share that content across your social network once it’s been pushed live. Which networks will go out on what, will the message say, what hash tags will it use, who’s going to do it, who is going to monitor and respond to the activity and keep the conversations going? These are all questions to keep in mind with each piece of content that you publish.
Last the popular social media outlets of today. They are not likely to remain constant forever. Remember Friendster, My Space, how about Netscape and AOL? In this industry companies rise and fall faster than ever before and you will need to keep an eye on the networks that matter for your audience and respond to them accordingly. Whichever networks you choose and however you choose to leverage them spending the time to get the word out about the content that you have worked so hard to create will be well worth the effort.
