Supercharge Your Content
Strategy With Social Media Sharing

Social media has had an enormous impact on virtually every aspect of life. Consumers engage in social media activities on a minute-by-minute basis, and the impact has carried over into the B2B realm, as well.  Brands interact with customers regularly, and this interaction helps to define a brand's image, as well as enabling better-targeted communication.

When it comes to social media, people typically spend way too much time talking about specific social media applications (i.e. Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, etc.) and not nearly enough on the actual content that fuels them. The sharing of content and information is at the very heart of the social web, and without good content, even the most robust of platforms are basically useless. So when we think about driving B2B social media success, we first need to focus on content. A properly-designed social media strategy will have you and your audience sharing not only your own content, but also content from other sources that might be relevant to your audience. Because, believe it or not, your audience is not concerned with only your content. Their own success is contingent on not just your product or service, but on a myriad of other products and services, as well as the industry landscape. And by bundling your own content with meaningful complementary content, you help to create an impression of thought-leadership within your audience. And by doing so, you've added real value, making it far more likely that your audience will share your content with others. Your audience, in effect, becomes part of your "distribution channel" for social media initiatives, helping to build and enhance your brand awareness.

5 Steps for Developing (or Improving) Your Social Media Content Strategy

1. Understand What's Actually Interesting to Your Audience — Remember, you're trying to influence them, not beat them over the head. Sure, you want to tell them all about your own products. But the idea here is to position yourself and your company as a thought leader within the industry, not just someone whose only goal is to pimp your own products or services. Think about ways in which you can provide your audience with industry information that might help them to do their jobs better. If you're stuck for ideas, a good place to start is to search currently popular articles from industry trade publications. Search on Google or Twitter to see what are the hot topics within your industry that are being shared. This will provide great insight into what's currently gotten everyone's attention. Also, you can ask your own customers what kind of information they search for routinely. Once you have some ideas, begin pulling together your own thoughts about these topics. At this point, you have the oppotunity to focus on issues that can underscore the value of your own products or services. Feel free to reference other sources; this will help to substantiate your opinions, as well as to adding value to your own content. If your audience feels the information is meaningful, they will be far more likely to share it with others.
2. Develop A Process For Pulling-Together Content — Unless you're a large, well-funded organization with a full-time social media specialist, you will be relying on yourself to search-out and qualify meaningful content worthy of sharing. Set-up a system that enables you to filter and receive relevant content all in one place. One simple way to do this is to set up an RSS reader, such as Google Reader. RSS feeds allow you to get real-time posts from across the Internet, all in one easy-to-manage location. You can also import RSS feeds from leading industry media outlets, as well as feeds from Twitter Search and Google Blog Search, into your selected reader. By doing so, you'll have created one tab in your browser that's loaded with relevant information that's ready to share with your audience. If RSS readers aren’t your bag, you could always use a real-time search engine like Topsy to help gather information. Plan on investing a little time for each cycle (whether it's daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly) to facilitate the process.
3. Establish A Distribution Process — Look at how your business is already distributing information online. What's missing? An e-mail newsletter? A Twitter account? A blog? On the social web, content becomes more powerful based on distribution. Bringing people to your website is a numbers game, and if you distribute information in 6 different ways instead of 3, more people will find it. Determine which methods and vehicles you will use. Of course, this is largely dependent on your bandwidth and resource constraints. Start small, and work your way up. If you're doing nothing currently, anything will be an improvement. The idea is to determine which channels will provide you with the most bang for your buck. If you already have an e-newsletter, that's a great platform to start with, but be sure to provide tools within the newsletter that encourage the sharing of your content, such as Share This buttons. Augment your newsletter with a Twitter account, and each time you publish the newsletter, be sure to update your Twitter feed. If you have a company page on Facebook and LinkedIn, (which you should), be sure to update your status there, each and every time you push-out new content. If you're just starting-out, a checklist will help you keep track of where you need to post.
   
   Also, folks who frequently share high-quality content online will often use a service to help streamline the distribution process. For example, a publishing platform like Posterous can enable you to post a photo to Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, all at the same time. Do some research to see which type of platforms can help with your content distribution, and you'll save time and help to ensure that you don't overlook any content distribution opportunities.
4. Implement a Measurement System — Measurement is still the most painful part of managing social media content distribution. Most publishing platforms have their own measurement systems that enable you to track views, engagement, etc. And while this is great, it also makes it difficult to have a single "dashboard" to evaluate the success of your distribution efforts. And even though spreadsheets can be a nuisance, most services will let you export your measurement data as a .csv file. If you pull this info into a spreadsheet, you'll be better able to compare platforms and understand the relative merits of each distribution channel.
5. Optimize The Timing of Your Content Distribution — Generally speaking, you'll want to avoid publishing on Mondays or Fridays, as content distributed on these daystends to get overlooked. TO get a better handle on who's accessyour content and when they're doing it, look at the measurement data from step 4 to understand exactly when your content is being read or shared. Does this mean you need to actually share it at these times? Not necessarily. However, there are many platform tools that let you schedule when you publish your content online. For example, many blogging platforms have a scheduling feature, and services like CoTweet and Hootesuite enable you to schedule when your messages appear on Twitter. By pushing-out content when your audience is most likely to read and/or share it, you're helping to ensure that its value is maximized.

The best brands are using social media to drive consumer behavior — driving consumers into stores, directing traffic to websites, and incentivizing customers to "share" their brand loyalty with their respective networks and communities. This last item is incredibly important, and needs attention and nurturing. When your brand is "shared" in this manner, it carries the weight of the sharer's credibility, and is typically viewed as being much more objective than are messages that originate from within your organization. Sharing content buildings credibility and will improve your inbound marketing efforts.

Encourage and Incentive Sharing of Your Content

You can also "incentivize" sharing behavior, and it's not only easy to do, but it can also pay huge dividends. Whether you're looking to reward customers you already have, or increase the size of your customer base, providing exclusive discounts and special deals can be a useful approach. Rewards can range from online-only offers and product-or-service discounts (redeemable by a referrer's company) to consumer-focused incentives such as gift cards (i.e. iTunes, Amazon, Amex, etc.) or entries into sweepstakes or prize drawings, redeemable directly by the referrers.

Developing a viable social media content strategy is relatively easy to do, and helps to position your organization as a thought leader, whose value transcends that of a mere vendor of products or services. And by making it easy for your audience to share your content, you can enlist them into helping carry your brand message much farther — and with more credibility — than you might be able to do on you own!

Got a tip you'd like to share, or maybe a question about any of the ideas presented here? Feel free to drop me a line at david.orban@oydesign.com.

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