Tips for Creating Content & Sharing Across Social Media
You publish a post to your blog or website. Then you copy and paste that link to the post across Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. With a few clicks, you put your new content in front of a large, diverse audience. Great strategy right? Not exactly.
Each social media channel has users that exhibit vastly different behavior and preferences for content. As such, you should optimize each social media posting according to the channel you’re posting in. It takes a bit more time, but it’s worth it. But how do you know how to promote for different channels?
Know your social media channels: Follow these guidelines for each social media channel:
Twitter: Short, snappy excerpts of interesting articles, or eye-catching images. Perfect for news and trending topics. Twitter is for the authority on specific subjects.
Facebook: Think social sharing. What will people want to share with their friends? Evoke emotions with clever headlines and short descriptions. Make people want to share what you have to say. And, share among each other.
LinkedIn: Caters to a professional audience. Shine the spotlight on your content to demonstrate usefulness to like-minded individuals and businesses.
Instagram: All about the visual. Your content should have a strong visual component to match your content. If your content does not necessarily have a visual component, create one.
Pinterest: Like a blend of Instagram and LinkedIn. It’s about the visuals, but also focuses on how-to, DIY, and practical advice so people will want to pin your post, which in essence is sharing it.
Post on Your Google Listing: Do you know that you can post on your Google listing? Posting regularly on your Google listing will increase your search results over Google platforms. Google loves when you use their products, and they will reward you for it. Like with all other social media platforms be consistent.
Create a Posting Schedule: Just as it’s tempting to blast your social media channels with the same exact post, you may be tempted to share your post to every channel at once. Instead, consider staggering your content sharing on each social media channel by a couple of days or so to maximize effect. Or, better yet, spend the time to create pertinent posts for each social platform.
Experiment and Optimize Posting: As with any marketing effort, you should be experimenting and optimizing with the frequency and timing of your content sharing. As you build a following, finding the right time to post on social media can make huge differences in the amount of traffic your content gets. There are analytics especially on Facebook that tell you when your fans are online. These are the times to get the most people to engage with your posts.
Track Engagement of Posts: It’s important to look at each post as it’s running, and when it is completed to see if it’s working. Is it getting shared? It is getting engagement? And, if you spend money on ads across social media platforms, make sure you check out the analytics for each ad to see if what you’re spending justifies the money spent. If not, change it up. Concentrate on being interesting, informative, and not too long winded. A good graphic, an interesting video, and a short, clever post will get the attention of those that are just scrolling through.