To be successful in social media marketing and truly engage with customers on sites like Facebook and Twitter, you’re going to need a social content strategy.
Setting up a Facebook page or Twitter profile for your business is only the first step. Visitors to your social pages will be able to gauge right away whether your business is actively engaged in social media or simply satisfied with having an empty placeholder page.
Businesses that want to get more out of social media marketing should consider adding video, audio, or written content to their social sites. Below we’ll review different types of social content and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each:
- Video
Pros: Video is embeddable, and highly engaging. When optimized for SEO, videos can add to your search strategy as well. For e-commerce businesses videos are increasingly being used as a way to showcase products (check out Zappos.com for examples). Some industries may even be able embed or link to existing Youtube or Vimeo videos relevant to their business.
Cons: Producing your own videos involves an investment in equipment and production and editing know-how. Appearing in videos may be an intimidating or embarrassing prospect for certain business owners.
- Audio
Pros: Thanks to the iTunes store and other podcast databases, audio content is easy to share with a wide audience. The equipment investment, production, and editing for audio is not as onerous as for video. Some businesses may be able to link to relevant existing podcasts for their industry and original podcasts can be optimized SEO purposes as well.
Cons: Audio alone is not as engaging as video. Podcasters will still need a good microphone, editing capabilities, a great voice, and a whole lot to say!
- Written Word
Pros: A blog is free or low-cost to create and requires less production time and equipment than video or audio. Blog posts are linkable, shareable, and great for SEO. It is easy to syndicate a blog as an e-mail newsletter or automatically integrate a blog strategy with Twitter, Facebook and other social sites.
Cons: Writing is the biggest drawback and hurdle for blogging. You will need a good editorial calendar in place and willing bloggers. To avoid embarrassing errors, you’ll also need to copy edit each post.
Instead of choosing just one format, why not look at these three types of content as different channels to be used in concert. For example, if you are creating a video, then the audio portion can potentially function as a podcast. If you are writing a script for a video or podcast, maybe you can use that outline as a blog post as well?
The key is to start populating your online and social media presences with engaging and relevant content. This will help customers to find you online, through SEO, and to engage with your business’ content on Facebook, Twitter and other sites.
To learn more about social media marketing and how it fits into your overall online strategy, contact the experts at AnchorWave in Tucson. Call us at (520) 622-3731 or visit us online.
