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3 Tips to Keep Your Content Marketing and Social Media Strategy on Track

Social media and content marketing go together like peanut butter and jelly – they’re just better together. We spend loads of time and energy creating content that is valuable to our readers. So how do we ensure this content gets into the right hands? Social media can be a perfect solution.

Once you have content to share, it’s important to use this as efficiently and effectively as possible. What are the results? Better SEO, higher brand engagement, and increased brand awareness to name a few.

Here are some tips to stay on the right track with social media and content marketing:

  • Have a plan – this includes an editorial calendar for all content, a plan to execute your social media strategy, and a goal of what you’d like to accomplish.
  • Interact – social media is a perfect place to connect with others. Start a conversation, offer valuable content, create a poll, run a contest and make sure almost all of your social media posts encourage engagement. When you share your content, try to do so in a way that speaks to your audience, not at them.
  • Analyze – the only way to find out if your strategy is effective, and that’s to analyze. Not sure where to start? Try these 5 free tools. If something isn’t working, take a look at the quality of both your content and your social media strategy, modify and try again.

Need some more guidance when it comes to content marketing and social media? Contact the Content Boost team.

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Teens Starting Mass Exodus from Facebook, What this Means for Your Business

I recently read an article about how teens are increasingly leaving Facebook. Aside from the un-cool factor of their parents (and even grandparents) being on it, teens have also stated that it is becoming too much of a popularity contest and taking up too much time.

Explains 14-year-old Casey Schwartz in the article: “I’ll wake up in the morning and go on Facebook just … because. It’s not like I want to or I don’t. I just go on it. I’m, like, forced to. I don’t know why. I need to. Facebook takes up my whole life.”

Is it just a matter of time before Facebook becomes the new MySpace and begins to quickly plummet, or can Facebook regain its cool-factor?

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Are You Encouraging a Two-Way Dialogue with Your Stakeholders?

Have you visited SocialMedia Examiner yet? If you are in the digital marketing space and have not yet done so, do yourself a favor and pay the site a visit. The “guide to the social media jungle” covers a variety of pertinent topics for marketers, from Facebook to Twitter to Pinterest to LinkedIn to the more broad-speaking “How on Earth do I weave social media into my content marketing strategy?”

Today’s top post, titled “26 Ways to Create Engaging Content” by Debbie Hemley could not be more dead on. Hemley explores the chief strategies for getting readers to engage with your copy—from injecting timely data to identifying keywords for optimization purposes to honing content objectives. My personal favorite? Encouraging a two-way conversation.

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A “Pin” Says A Thousand Words

When Pinterest exploded onto the scene a few short years ago, users instantly became hooked – I know I did. I submitted my request to join and eagerly waited for the confirmation to hit my inbox. I was, and still am, easily sucked into the site for longer periods of time than I’d like to admit.

The premise of the site is quite simple: you “pin” images you like from other sites —from tablets to wedding dresses to sporting equipment—to have a central location of items you want to revisit for later use. You can also re-pin images that other users have posted and follow other users. So why has the site seen so much popularity and growth over the last few years?

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Kitchen Nightmares Restaurant’s Colossal Meltdown – How NOT to Do Social

Everything you shouldn’t do when executing your social media strategy can be exemplified in one not-so-pretty package: Amy’s Baking Company.

Capture9In case you missed it, Amy’s Baking Company made quite the impression on viewers when the restaurant appeared on Gordon Ramsay’s reality TV show Kitchen Nightmares. The husband- wife duo, Samy and Amy tell Ramsay—no more than five minutes after arriving—that “There are a lot of online bullies and haters and bloggers. We stand up to them and I think we are the only ones that ever have as restaurant owners. They come and try to attack us and say horrible things that are not true because they are used to eating processed wood chips.” A baffled Ramsey later learns there is much more to the story. This was the first restaurant he has given up on before the “rehabilitation” phase which includes suggestions on how to improve the restaurant’s food, wait staff and bottom line.

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The Imminent Ubiquity of Content Marketing: What Happens Next?

Content Marketing Institute Founder Joe Pulizzi explores a really interesting question in one of his more recent blog posts: Once all brands have started embracing content marketing, what happens next?

Ah, the great old question of what comes next.

We certainly all asked it a few decades ago when the world was first introduced to the mobile phone. And while bulky and hefty, we quickly watched as it paved the way for the dominance of smartphones, apps and the BYOD revolution. Fast forward to today and the competition for your consumer-ready hands is fierce.

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Are You Just Waking Up to Content Marketing?

In Washington Irving’s classic tale Rip Van Winkle, a young man leaves his home along the Hudson River for a sojourn into the Catskill Mountains where he encounters a group of strange, bearded men. As the story goes, Rip proceeds to drink their liquor, and soon falls into a deep slumber.

When Rip finally wakes up, the world around him seems like a very different place. He is startled to learn that he too has grown a long beard. The stock of his gun has rotted away, and his dog has run off. This is because Rip did not sleep for just one night—he was out cold for 20 years. Confusion mounts as Rip walks into town and discovers how everything around him has changed. Continue reading “Are You Just Waking Up to Content Marketing?”

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Don’t Be the Pushy Salesman

You’ve experienced it a hundred times before – you walk into a store and are immediately bombarded by a slew of salespeople asking questions about what you’re looking for and directing you to their current promotion. Like most people, I want to immediately walk out.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you’ve probably experienced helpful sales staff. They let you take a minute to look around and settle in before approaching you and answer your questions not because they’re looking for a sale, but because they genuinely want to educate you about a product. I don’t know about you, but those are the brands I recommend to others and return to again and again.

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The Seven Deadly Social Media Sins of Content Marketing

If you’ve just joined the content marketing club, you’ll soon be flying high in the social media stratosphere. Social media is world full of unlimited content marketing possibilities. In fact, the networking strategy produces almost double the marketing leads compared to trade shows, telemarketing, direct mail or pay-per-click (PPC), according to research this year from HubSpot.

But before you get ready to take off, you must first beware of the seven deadly sins of using social media when it comes to marketing your content.  

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A Win for Oreo’s Great Gatsby Tweet

Oreo nailed it with its Great Gatsby inspired tweet that it posted on the film’s booming opening day last Friday.

While the tweet never specifically mentioned The Great Gatsby by name, it alluded to some of the story’s main points including the iconic and symbolic Doctor T.J. Eckleburg billboard—promoting an optometrist’s practice but also serving as a reminder of the growing commercialism of America and the emergence of the American dream—and J. Gatsby’s affinity for calling everybody “old sport.”  Perfectly tying it into the Oreo brand, the company shared a tweet that read “A Great story calls for a great cookie.”

Oreo   tjeckleburg

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