In the age of social media, marketers have more content, channels and campaigns to manage than ever before. But we still have the same number of hours in every day, so we have to be more resourceful – like the Indians were with buffalo.
“Native Americans famously used every part of the buffalo; they didn’t just take the choice cut and leave the rest,” says Rich Brooks, president of flyte new media and founder of the Marketing Agents blog and podcast. “They took the horn and turned it into a spoon, they took the hide and used it, they made sleds with the bones. Why? Perhaps they realized that the buffalo was a limited resource. Maybe they saw so much value in the buffalo that they wanted to extract every last bit of it.”
Brooks spoke at the Social Media Marketing World Conference in San Diego recently to explain how to be more resourceful on social media.
- Create Less Content
It’s not about creating more content; it’s about creating better content.
“You cannot beat the internet on volume; you will lose,” Brooks says. “You can beat the internet on quality, clarity and perspective. Nobody can beat you on your perspective.”
Instead of churning out mediocre blog posts twice a week, spend more time researching and polishing the content, adding compelling images, and “making it insanely valuable to your ideal customer,” Brooks says. If that means posting once a month, you’re adding more value that way.
Of course, you have to make content that’s relevant to your audience, or else you’re wasting your time. Brooks suggests these 5 free “listening” tools:
- Keyword Planner, Google’s keyword research tool, shows the highest searched terms for your topic, helping you create content based on common queries.
- Google Trends shows search volume for terms over time. For example, searches for hair restoration and hair replacement have declined, while “hair loss” queries stay consistent. This can help refine your topics to be relevant.
- BuzzSumo shows the most shared content on a topic or a competitor’s domain, so you can see what’s post popular across social media.
- Email can be valuable for simply requesting input from your audience. Brooks suggests sending an autoresponder to email subscribers as soon as they sign up for your emails, asking them to share their biggest challenge so you can address it on your blog.
- Google Analytics shows you the most read content on own site, as well as search terms that lead people there, to spur additional ideas.
- Curate Content
There’s no need to reinvent content when you can share what other key influencers are posting, tweeting and pinning. Use tools like Feedly, Hootsuite or Buffer to find content related to your topic, and mention the author when you share it. Find an engaging YouTube video or infographic you can embed into blog post. Or send out an email recap at the end of the week sharing links to the 10 best articles you read.
Brooks follows the 80/20 rule, so 80% of what he shares on social media comes from other sources and 20% of the content is his. Here are his other hacks to produce content without actually writing it:
- The Crowd Hack – ask friends and industry peers to share their best advice on a topic, and compile a list of tips that links back to each contributor’s website. You’re crowdsourcing content with little effort, and because you’re giving them visibility in return, they’ll often share it for you.
- Share the Load – get others in your organization involved in blogging, or hire a copywriter to help you craft persuasive copy that gets people to take action.
- Conduct Interviews – Brooks spent 6 hours generating 12 minutes of audio for his first podcast, before he realized how much easier it is to interview other experts. Plan poignant questions and potential follow-ups, and then sit back and let someone else do the talking.
- Maximize Your Reach
After taking time to create content, make sure you’re promoting it and packaging it to attract people who want to read it.
Follow a promotion schedule to share your blog post across social media. That is why you put sharing buttons at the top, right?
“When I see zero shares, it means that not even the author could get behind the post,” Brooks says, comparing it to a bartender putting money in his own tip jar to build social proof. “Check off those sharing boxes to let others know that this is the expected behavior – if you like this, share it.”
Brooks’ promotion schedule looks something like this:
- Monday: Create blog post. Share on Facebook, Twitter.
- Tuesday: Promote through email newsletter.
- Wednesday: Tweet again. Have staff share on personal LinkedIn profiles, etc.
- Thursday: Ask coworkers/friends to share and like.
- Friday: Reshare on Twitter from a different angle. Share on Google+ and Pinterest.
But you didn’t work that hard to create one piece of content just to promote for a week, so repackage content you’ve already created. Repurpose a blog into various formats for different channels, and refresh old content with updated pictures, key words and links.
For example, Brooks wrote a well-received blog post sharing 50 content creation ideas. A few months later, when he was invited to speak at a national conference, he turned each bullet point from his blog into a slide deck for his presentation. Then he created 50 tweets, timed to go out during his presentation. Then he uploaded the slides to SlideShare, and gained thousands of downloads…from one initial blog post. That blog post was his buffalo, and he squeezed more value out of it by using every ounce he possibly could.
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Image credit: Rich Brooks, Social Media Marketing World presentation