You’ve crafted your most wonderful piece of content to date. In fact, it’s one of those where it’s SO good you’ve actually surprised yourself. After marvelling at it in wonder for a few minutes, you load it up and paste the link in your Twitter and Facebook accounts with an accompanying call to action (along the lines of ‘Read this!’) you’ve come up with in a hurry before moving onto your next masterpiece.
Sound familiar? If you’re nodding along, then you’re not using social media to its full potential – and you could be missing out big time.
Yes, content is king and it is royally important to ensure your content is sparkling, relevant and engaging – and all variations of positive adjective. However, distribution and amplification is just as important as content creation. How else are you going to ensure your content is read by the right people?
Share your content in the right places and soon you’ll be getting likes, shares and comments galore, which you can then work with to boost engagement and interaction with readers and potential customers. Sharing content on the right social networks means that it is more likely to draw interest from people who are more liable to view and then share it, so that the content effectively distributes itself.
So how do you go about doing this? The key is to always have your target audience in mind; when you’re brainstorming, when you’re writing, when you’re amplifying – and that means keeping an eye on who’s networking where.
If you’re targeting those aged under 25, it may be best to give Facebook a miss and make a beeline for the likes of reddit and tumblr – and even good old Myspace, which is still kicking around from all those years ago.
You know those highly embarrassing Facebook statuses that your mum and even your granny like to publish every so often? That’s because older generations are using Facebook as their jumping off point when it comes to social media, so if you’re targeting an audience over 45 years of age, that’s the place to go.
Here’s a lovely infographic with what you need to know.
As well as posting in the right place, it is worth noting that your call to action – how you encourage people to click – is still part of your content and should be well thought out. Pique interest with a question, incorporate the headline of the piece if it’s particularly eye-catching or give your readers a taste of what’s to come with a teaser.
Jenny Maclean
