Social Media – Of Many Types Of Content Marketing

Value is the name of the game when it comes to marketing. How far can you stretch your marketing dollars and what kind of return on investment can you squeeze from your budget? It all depends on how savvy you are when it comes to execution! Generally, content marketing gives you the best bang for your buck—but only if you know how to milk every last impression from it. Often, that means repurposing your blog content effectively for other channels.

Enter: social media. Social media and blog content go together like salt and pepper. They employ a lot of the same techniques to attract readers, and they’re generally two cornerstones of a well-rounded content marketing strategy. But there’s another reason for their synergy. Some of the best social media posts come from blog content, and those social posts are the best promoters of the original post!

Done right, you can create a fully-deployable piece of content for maximum exposure—and you only pay for the cost of a blog post.

Why is repurposing content important?

Before we get into how to repurpose blog posts into engaging social media content, let’s start with why you should.

As we’ve already mentioned, there’s a lot of value in stretching content. If you pay for a great blog post and end up getting social posts (or even email content) out of it, you’ve already reaped a great ROI. There’s also tremendous value in getting broad exposure for your blog post through social. If you share it to 1,000 followers and even one or two of those people share it with their 1,000 followers, you’re getting exponential exposure.

You also need to think about your content strategy. You’re writing blog posts for SEO, sure; but you’re also using that content to connect with customers and establish your brand. It needs to get seen! If you write a blog post and let it languish on your site, it’s not going to get the attention it deserves. Repurpose it into a social post and you give it new life, where it’ll attract new eyes and interactions, fulfilling the original purpose.

Repurposing content is part of content marketing best practices. Think of your content like building blocks for your brand. You can assemble them in as many ways as your imagination allows. In the case of blog content, creative repurposing is encouraged. What better outlet for it than social media?

7 tips for turning blogs into social posts

Turning a great blog post into an equally-great social post takes finesse. You can’t just copy/paste the first sentence of the blog, throw in some hashtags, drop in an emoji and call it a day! Here are a few tips for turning your blog posts into winning socials that stand out.

1. Choose exciting blog posts. Start with the posts on your site that have good traction already. A post with 1.5k views is going to fare better than one with 250—it’s already a proven winner. Look for posts with high engagement and figure out why they have such good readership. Then, adapt these traits into the social post.
2. Make sure the visuals work. Social media is a visual platform. Blogs tend to be text-heavy. You need to bridge this gap, and the best way to do it is through an engaging visual parallel. If your post is all about puppies, find the most adorable image you can for the social post. If it’s about plumbing leaks, choose an image that’ll make people stop scrolling. Remember, the picture is what people see—it’s your first chance to earn readership.
3. Customize across platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn all have different voices. If you’re adapting blog posts for each platform, make sure they’re different. It may seem like a lot of work to rewrite posts for every site, but the engagement you’ll get is worth it. Remember, leverage the traits that make your blog engaging and finesse the message. LinkedIn = professional. Twitter = succinct. Facebook = casual. Instagram = visual.
4. Write multiple social posts. Plan to iterate your social posts. That is, create multiple posts for the same blog post on the same platform. Think of it like A/B testing. Pick a different value proposition, headline or hashtags, and see what you get in terms of engagement.
5. Optimize the blog link. Don’t forget to connect your social post with the original blog post. Drop a link at the end of the post and be sure to use a link optimizer to shorten it. That way, anyone whose curiosity you pique with your post is only one click away from the original content. It’s a great way to turn social followers into on-site readers.
6. Incorporate your keywords. Hashtags keep the social conversation going. Use two to four in your post and make sure they’re relevant—i.e. the keywords you optimized while writing your blog post. This not only creates deeper cohesion between the social post and the blog, but it’ll also get your relevant content in front of anyone following a particular hashtag.
7. Learn and adapt! There’s a lot to learn from social interactions and your followers will tell you which posts work and which don’t by their interactions. Pay attention to what’s getting likes and shares on social media, and monitor your site analytics to see which blog posts get traffic and from where. Use this information to craft winning social posts from your blog content!

Time To Fire Up Your Content Marketing Strategy

There’s tremendous opportunity in repurposing content—especially when it comes to blog content as social media posts. Follow the tips above and be mindful of when and how you’re sharing your content.

Once you get the hang of turning great blog posts into winning social content, take it a step further. Could you turn that blog into email content? That social post into a PPC ad? Your blog posts into an ebook? There’s virtually no end to how you can repurpose good content, and you’ll start to find synergies everywhere you look!

The post How to Leverage Blog Content and Repurpose it into Winning Social Posts appeared first on BizIQ.