Not incorporating social media into your marketing stratagem is a grave mistake. Luckily, brands are aware of the importance of social. And they have been making an active social presence.
Social content is a game-changer. It connects with audiences, encourages them to buy and share their product experiences with others. Social content guarantees better sale and transparency.
But, producing social content on a regular basis and as a part of a larger marketing gameplan is difficult unless there are ideas and content inspiration. Just as brands
#1. Curation helps
Curation is the new mantra in content marketing. There are endless benefits of content curation. Interestingly, most of these benefits center around social media. In fact, social media is often dubbed as content curation powerhouse.
There are two ways brands can use curated content:
- They share the links to third-party curated content from their social media fanpages. Curata recommends 25% of content should be curated. Curation can supply them enough content to fill up their social media calendar.
- They can get innovative topic ideas from curated content and produce original content on those topics.
Additionally, a brand can write content in response to curated content. On social media, such content can garner a decent reader-base. Content produced in response to third-party curated content can be of two types. The author may agree with the opinion expressed in the curated content and write in favor of it. Or, he may write against it and attempt to disprove what it claims.
Feel free to take any stand that suits you. What matters is whether the content is persuasive. On social media, people can share their opinion and add their inputs, enabling the brand to find more topic ideas.
#2. Visit top blogs
By scanning top blogs in the same niche, content marketers can get topic ideas. Top blogs are very serious about their reputation. They know if their reputation gets spoiled, they’d lose their reader-base. To keep up, these blogs make new posts live every day on interesting topics.
Simply copying these topics won’t do any good. Some content marketers follow this route, but they fail to bring uniqueness to their content. A much better approach is to scan individual posts and the noise that these posts are making on social media. How readers are reacting to these posts, and what opinion they are expressing
Akin to an unsolved crime mystery, a thought-provoking piece of content leaves many clues in its wake. A content marketer needs to know how to pick those clues and produce content based on them. Such content can be a big hit among social media users, especially among those, who have read the original content.
Social media news aggregating sites have been becoming increasingly popular among content marketers. These sites yield the following benefits:
- They surf through dozens of categories and find hundreds of shareable content, which they can curate or use as topic ideas.
- We know “social is the new
SEO .” The content suggested to you by social news aggregators are all approved by Google, in the sense that Google has already observed that posts written on these topics have registered engagement. - It’s difficult to verify the authenticity of information flowing on the Internet. Social news aggregators can be of help. These sites collect information from various sources and users also comment on them, making cross-verification easy.
The best part of a social news aggregator is its ranking algorithm. These algorithms are smart enough to understand the level of user engagement for content featured on the aggregating sites.
For the handheld user-base, there are social news aggregating apps. Alongside Reddit, Slashdot, Digg and Metafilter, there are community-based news aggregators like Upworthy, BuzzFeed and ViralNova.
#4. Visuals and quotes
Content with plenty of images, graphs, charts, infographics and audio-visual media elements is bound to entertain social media users. On Facebook, we see 4-seconds long GIFs getting millions of views and thousands of likes and shares.
Clearly, the length of the content is irrelevant. On social media, the only thing that matters is whether or not the content is capable of entertaining users. Visuals and quotes are both entertaining. In the garb of entertainment, these marketing weapons create a bond between a brand and its audiences.
By quoting experts, content marketers can claim authority. On social media, they can tag people so that the content with quote in it goes viral. A lot depends on how thought-provoking the quote is and how it blends with the theme of the content. Also, when one references inspirational quotes from experts, he curates content – not just any content but a very powerful piece of content. When such content circulates on social media, thought leadership is earned.
When quotes are combined with visuals, their appeal increases tenfold. Look at the following visual:
People will pay as much attention to the quote as to the picture of Abraham Lincoln. Content with visuals mixed with quotes can trigger user engagement on social media and generate volumes of social content.
#5. Gender-based content ideas
Don’t call me sexist. Recent studies show men and women differ in their buying patterns. While men are more interested in “buying”, women prefer “shopping.” Identifying your product and the gender of the group that are its target audiences can help you brew better content ideas.
And once again, social media is the hotbed of gender-based content ideas. Millions of people interact with each other on social networks. Users respond to branded content, expressing their opinion. Analytics tools can analyze their conversations and reactions and find gender-specific patterns.
Next, brands need to create content in regard to those patterns. And more importantly, share the content on social media where users could easily familiarize with them. For example, Pinterest is heavily dominated by women, whereas most Redditors are male. This way, it’d be easy to generate social content and popularize a brand.
Summing up
It’s clear from the discussion above that social media is absorbing the online marketing vertical. Not only it is instrumental in content gaining popularity among the readers, but also as a forcing house for content ideas and inspiration.
Image: Social media,social network concept.
