A beginner’s guide to promote content on social media

If you don’t know how to promote content on social media, putting all the pieces together can feel like quite a challenge. There are so many options, so many technologies, and so many tips and tricks all clamoring for your attention.

To help distill the process down to its basic elements, we’ve created two imaginary business owners: Marisa, who owns a retail store, and Ted, who owns a professional services firm. This post will outline their businesses needs and their content promotion goals. Then it will lay out a detailed weekly content promotion plan and schedule for each of them.

Each promotion plan is a little different, because the businesses are different. Your business will be different than these plans too, of course. But after reading this you’ll know:

• The basic elements of a promotion plan
• How they should change with different business priorities
• How to decide which options are best for you

These promotion plans do not go into a screen-shot by screen-shot explanation of how to set up tweets or Facebook updates. They don’t talk about ideal post length or timing. Those are important, but they’re more the “branches” and “leaves” level of detail for content promotion. This post is a guide through the forest.

How to promote content on social media – example 1: Marisa, modern furniture store owner

Marisa has got a retail location and a website. She gets most of her sales through the retail store, and about 20% of sales from the website.

The retail location needs more foot traffic. It’s in a good area of town, but hidden behind a larger retail business. If people just knew how close her store was, she knows she could see a big increase in sales.

Her website is doing well enough, but not great. It doesn’t get a lot of traffic. However, because she’s an avid enthusiast of modern design, she always writes weekly blog post updates on the company blog. She’d love to curate more content for her social media accounts.

Marisa is smart with computers, understands the basics of social media and learns pretty fast. But online marketing is not her first love. She’d rather be talking to customers or sourcing new décor for her store.

Marisa currently has accounts on these social media platforms:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn
• Tumblr
• Google+
• Instagram

How to use her content and curated content to promote her business

Because Marisa has been publishing a weekly blog post, she’s actually got a lot of content. She’s also lucky because she naturally likes to read and share what she finds on other furniture design sites. After she learned that curated content can be as convincing to potential buyers as in-house content, she’s completely fine with setting up a 3 to 1 sharing ratio, where she’ll share three curated pieces of content for every one piece of in-house content.

Marisa can also queue up her social media posts with Scoop.It Content Director, or any of the other social management tools. Her plan for each of networks is below. She’ll also set up publishing goals in Content Director and be able to track when she hits or misses those goals.

Comments about this plan

Marisa is simplifying a lot of work by sending basically the same updates to Pinterest, Tumblr, Google+ and Instagram. She’s not truly active and engaged on those platforms, but wants to keep a foothold there because she does get some traffic.

Her big time investments are the blog post, Facebook, and the email newsletter. She has chosen to invest the most time in those platforms because that’s where she’s getting the most results.

She could save even more time by curating every other blog post, and by using Content Director to automatically created a curated email. She could also save time by checking her analytics, seeing which posts and shares did best over the last month or so, and then reposting those updates. It is okay to reshare and repost content on social sites, especially if it is content people liked, and you don’t have much more than 10-15% of your content being reshares.

If she wanted, Marisa might also be able to expand her presence on Pinterest. She does get orders from that traffic now and then, so there is a business incentive to put more time into it.

She might also want to consider cutting Twitter, or scaling back her updates there. That’s a bold move, and might not necessarily be a good call. But at least so far her analytics data is not showing any orders, email list sign-ups, or even much traffic from her Twitter presence. The same argument could be made for her Tumblr and Instagram accounts, but she’s not ready to close up shop on those platforms quite yet.

How to promote content on social media – example 2: Ted, tax preparation firm owner

Ted owns a tax preparation firm that specializes in helping people with rental properties. He works with people across the country. There are three other CPAs in his firm, plus several accountants and other assistants. He gets much of his business from referrals, with the remainder coming from his website and when he does public speaking at conferences.

He’d like to get far more work through his website, which means getting more traffic. Ted himself writes about one post a month for the company blog; each of the other CPAs writes one post a month, too. They’d all very much like to complement those posts with more curated content so they could be working with clients, not writing blog posts. Ted is also intrigued by the idea of writing a book, which he thinks would better position him as an expert and let him increase his rates.

Ted is very smart with computers, but he really doesn’t want to do any of the social media marketing. One of his junior accountants is very interested in social media, and so Ted would like to have that employee do the bulk of the online promotion for the firm.

Ted currently has accounts on these social media platforms:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• SlideShare

How to use his content and curated content to promote his business

Ted and his team have been writing good blog posts every week, but it’s been taking a lot of time. They could shift over to letting the junior accountant curate posts, even if it was just every other week. That alone would open up about 8 more hours per month of time to work with clients instead of writing blog posts (at $150 per hour, a $1,200 per month savings). If curating posts don’t appeal to them, they could possibly hire a good freelance writer to write the blog posts, and maybe to work with them on the longer content formats (ebooks and resource guides). The writer might also be able to ghost-write or draft sections of Ted’s book.

Ted and his senior team could set up a loose system to forward content to curate and share to the junior accountant. That accountant/social media manager could then queue up social media updates weeks in advance. If they had any holes in their update schedule, they could use Scoop.It to find other interesting content. This system could let Ted basically back off entirely from the social media promotion and just focus on clients, his book and his presentations.

Ted’s presentations also represent a terrific stream of content. Every talk he does could be recorded and put on the site. Excerpts of those talks could be linked to in email updates and in social media updates. And every PowerPoint deck he creates could be made into a SlideShare deck.

Comments about this plan

Ted’s biggest problem is extricating himself from social media chores and not getting as much exposure for his blog posts as he’d like. That can be addressed somewhat by buying advertising, but he might do better to find one or two industry forums where he or his accountant/social media manager could promote his blog posts.

Ted might also want to consider writing a couple of guest posts. That would help position him as an authority and showcase his expertise, but it might also help build his email list, and warm up the reception for his book. It also might help to get him more speaking engagements. He also might want to try writing a case study or two, either in blog post format or as a separate piece of content.

If he really wanted to save time, Ted might want to get ruthless and cut Facebook and Twitter. That’s an unusual call because those are considered two of the biggest social media platforms. But Ted is just not seeing much results from either of those platforms. He is getting a steady stream of real business from LinkedIn, though, so maybe the time now being spent on Facebook and Twitter might be better spent nurturing more business on LinkedIn.

Conclusion

Those are just two approaches for how to promote content based on an underlying content strategy that is based on ROI. Being able to know which content is driving results is critical. After that, the next most important thing is to be able to schedule it ahead of time. Using curated content saves both these businesses several hours each week.

What does your content promotion plan look like? Would you make any changes to these content promotion plans? Tell us about what you’d change in the comments.

If you want to get 30 effective techniques to master content marketing along with valuable insights from 10+ influencers like Mark Schaefer, Rebecca Lieb, Lee Odden, Jason Miller or Ian Cleary, download our free eBook now!

Image by mkhmarketing

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