I recently participated on a marketing panel where the discussion topic was titled “Digital and Online. What’s Next” and a lot of the discussion and questions were about social media and social media marketing.
There is a distinct trend within digital marketing called “content marketing” that has emerged as marketing continues to evolve that is facilitated by social media.
Social media allows information to be shared and amplified by online word of mouth…also sometimes called “world of mouth”. Previously the only way you could share information was through actual word of mouth in your town or village square either face to face or telephone. Social media with its ease of use and it’s power to share information virally to many friends at once is changing the marketing landscape.
Many marketers have not picked up this emerging trend of content marketing as it is not currently mainstream.
Hubspot is one of several B2B Technology companies that have developed a technology platform that leverages the “Content Marketing” through optimizing and promoting that content through Search Engine Optimization and Social Media.
So we now have 3 New Pillars of Marketing and they are.
- Content including text , video and powerpoint presentations amongst many other types of media
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization).. to facilitate that content to be found by people using search engines such as Google.
- Social Media.. to amplify and leverage the content through online word of mouth
A recent guest post on the Hubspot blog by Zack Urlocker covers how effective this type of marketing has become when he said.
” When Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL in 2008, we applied the same techniques (inbound marketing through content) across Sun’s entire product line of software, servers and storage. The results were significant. In the course of a year, we increased the lead volume by 100x and created a pipeline of revenue approaching a $500 million annual run rate.” ..Now that is a B2B marketing strategy that is worth pursuing.
Also Lee Odden from Top Rank Blog adds to the discussion and takes a closer look at enhancing your content marketing with a post title ” 10 Steps to Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy” that is certainly a great read on the topic.
I recently wrote a post titled “30 Things You Shouldn’t Share on Social Media” which highlighted some of the negative aspects of social media.
To be positive I decided that I should list “20 things you should share on social media” that can assist your business to be viewed as a leader in its industry and drive inquiry and sales and help you get found online.
So here is a list that might assist you with what things you should be sharing as a business on social media.
20 Things You Should Share On Social Media
- YouTube Videos reviewing products or showing how to construct a product for DIY
- Photos of events, exhibitions and post them on Flickr
- If you are a creative business and create images and art also put them on Flickr or other social media sharing sites
- Audio recordings of your online videos put them on your website or blog
- PDF documents of offline archived information that is appropriate to put online
- Slideshare presentations
- Graphs
- Infographics
- Webinars
- Podcasts
- Music if you are a musician
- Text format of your video blog posts
- Microsoft Office Documents
- Notes displaying keypoints from your power point presentations
- Newsletters
- Press releases about your brand
- News items about your company
- Your Bookmarking such as Delicious, Stumbleupon and Digg
- Competitions shouldn’t be just advertised on traditional Mass Media but shared via social media ..have a look at Ford’s Fiesta competition
- Share your humour.. mix up your serious content with some humourous photo’s, articles and even cartoons
Every one of these different types of content or “digital assets” can be published on multiple social media channels that are appropriate to leverage your content by world of mouth.
TIP: You can always find a social media expert or freelancer on Fiverr.
What content are you sharing on social media and can you do it better?
- Posts from your blog
- What you are passionate about in your business