Introduction

Welcome back everybody for part 2 of my content marketing series. In this blog, I will go over how social media can help to improve your content marketing. We will look at the different social media platforms and which ones are going to help you. Let us dive right in by looking at different social media platforms and how they work.

Selecting Social Media Platforms

Let us start this off by looking at some statistics about each different social media platform (Jones, 2020):

• Instagram
  • 1 billion users
  • Users follow at least 1 business
• Facebook
  • 2 billion users
• YouTube
  • Large global audience
  • Users mainly consist of males
• Pinterest
  • A visual search engine
  • Users mainly consist of females
• LinkedIn
  • 500 million users
  • Most users work in an upper management position.
• Twitter
  • Been highly adopted by businesses
  • Consists of mostly a male audience

When looking at what social media platform you are going to use make sure your audience uses that platform.

You will need to determine what type of content you want to produce. Photos can capture people’s attention with bright and vibrant colours. Videos offer a unique way to deliver content (Jones, 2020).

You could use live video (streaming) to give your audience a perspective they would not see. You can stream content on Facebook or YouTube. Different videos you can stream are Q&As, walkthroughs, keynotes, interviews, or behind the scenes (Jones, 2020).

Influencers can take over your social media platform. Influencers can help to build your business a community and gain more customers. Interactive content gives a way for people to engage with you. Different forms of interactive content consist of polls, questions, prompts, or giveaways (Jones, 2020).

There are third-party apps that can help you to get started. It is also important to learn the features of each platform. Each of the social media platforms has different algorithms that you will need to learn to help your content get noticed. Most platform’s algorithms look at content based on quality and relevancy (Jones, 2020).

Let us dive into the different platforms ways to help you advertise on social media. You have most of your basic demographics such as age, location, race, gender, status, income, education. Facebook has advance targeting demographics such as household makeup, income level, relationship status (Jones, 2020).

You can target by interest. You can set the criteria based on interests people have or interests they do not have. This will help to ensure that only the people you want will find your content. For example, if you create gameplay videos you would want to set up criteria based on people that are interested in video games.

You can set up custom audiences. This consists of making up your audience based on data that you already have. You can get started by using your customer relationship management software (CRM) or email list (Jones, 2020). This allows you in the future to retarget that audience with future content.

You can use a lookalike audience as well. You identify existing groups and change a few elements to get matched with a new audience like the first one. For gameplay videos you can set up your audience that is interested in video games and have it, so your audience is interested in the specific game as well. At the end of the day, you cannot just post content you need to look at the different social media platforms. We will look at how to promote your content on social media.

Promoting Content with Social Media

There are different methods to promote content on social media. You can use teasers to help promote your content. A teaser is just a sample of content. Some forms of teasing content are a trailer, or a quote from your article (Jones, 2020). You will want to determine the right format for your teaser based on the social media platform. You will want to consider these when creating teasers (Jones, 2020):

• Keep it simple
• Experiment
• Use Follow up posts
• Time the teasers strategically

You can also consider creating a teaser campaign. A teaser campaign is made up of a series of different posts. It serves to create a mystery for your audience to get them excited for the full reveal.

The most powerful tool you must promote your content is your audience. When customers have a great experience with your content, they will want to share it (Jones, 2020). You will want to figure out which days and time people are sharing your content the most. You want to make it easy for your audience to share your content. You will want to create compelling content that is worthy of sharing. This can include creating effective headlines, making a clear description, or using compelling visuals (Jones, 2020).

More people are consuming content on social media than they are on television (Jones, 2020). You might want to look at advertising to promote your content. Social media is a great tool to advertise your content. There are three things you will want to consider when advertising on social media. You can use targeting tools to help increase the chances of your content being viewed (Jones, 2020). You will want to promote higher-performing content. Lastly, you will want to experiment and test promoting different content to see which ones work better than others (Jones, 2020). Let us look at how to manage and grow your audience on social media.

Managing and Growing a Social Media Audience

When you decide which social media platform you will need to know how often you should post. With Twitter, you should post multiple times a day. With Facebook or LinkedIn if you post once a day that is enough. With Instagram, you will want to post at least twice a day.

You might be using multiple social media channels and will need a way to organize yourself and know when to post. A social media calendar is an excellent tool to keep you on track when using social media to post content. An important thing to remember is to align your social media calendar with your content calendar (Jones, 2020). You can set one up yourself using a spreadsheet. You can also use different tools such as Trello, Buffer, CoSchedule, or Hootsuite (Jones, 2020). These tools also have features that you should take advantage of.

Social Media has different features that offer unique ways for you to deliver your content. A popular feature on Instagram is Instagram stories. This feature allows you to post in the moment or stored videos or photos (Jones, 2020). Your audience can get a behind-the-scenes look at the magic that happens in the background. With YouTube, you will want to follow what the current trend is. A popular type of video used to be unboxing videos. With LinkedIn, you can write articles directly on the website (Jones, 2020). Stories have become a feature that has been integrated with the platform. You want to make your content easy to find.

An important point you want to remember is that you want to foster engagement with social media content. You will want to set a positive and personable tone (Jones, 2020). This allows your audience to connect with you. You can use humour to connect with them. Make sure you are using a strategy for how you want to foster engagement. Consider using a style guide to set your tone and voice (Jones, 2020). Your audience will want to interact with your content when you set the right tone.

Your customers are also potential content creators. Your audience can create user-generated content that you can use to your advantage (Jones, 2020). Using user-generated content can help reduce the burden of coming up with new content ideas all the time. Using your social media audience’s content helps to build a stronger connection (Jones, 2020). Video game companies take advantage by showing off their users’ content which will make more people engage with the channel. Lastly, your audience’s content helps to build trust (Jones, 2020). If you show off a post or a video where someone enjoys using your product or service more people will want to try out what you have to offer. The next section will cover partnering with influencers for your content marketing.

Partnering with Influencers

Within your social media network, there could be influencers that you can team up with to create more powerful content. Influencers are people on social media that have a large following. You might want to consider partnering with one to increase your content marketing efforts. You will want to do your research into influencers. You want to make sure they fit with your brand values and audience. You can look at comments to see if your audience is talking about anybody. You can also use research tools such as (Jones, 2020):

• Followerwork
• Fourstarzz
• Izea
• AspireIQ
• Upfluence

You will also want to look at what topics they cover, and their values.

One way to use influencers is through an influencer campaign. If you decide to use an influencer behind your campaign, there are three things you want to consider. Make sure that you set up rules for the influencer to follow. You do not want to be too restrictive of your rules because you want the influencer to be creative in delivering your content. You will also want clear data on what the results of the campaign were (Jones, 2020). In the video game industry, the use of influencers is the strongest way to sell games. This method also allows for different types of content that can be produced by the influencers.

If you need help finding influencers you there are different influencer marketing solutions out there. You can use different platforms that will help you to understand what the influencer is all about. You can use an agency service that will represent influencers that can determine if they will work for your campaign. You can use a combination of both as well. Let us look over some tips for the different social networks.

Tips for Major Social Networks

In this section, I will go over two different social networks (YouTube and LinkedIn) and discuss different things you can try to get better content for your social media. So, YouTube Studio lets you do different things to help get your video searched for. Firstly, you can create teasers for upcoming content. This will allow you to get your audience engaged and anticipated for your next piece of content. For setting up to release your video keep a few things in mind. Attractive images with contrasting colours can help draw a person’s attention to your video and click on it to watch (Jones, 2020). You will want to use short words for your titles so that people know what the video is about without having to read a lot of text.

Next, the use of playlists can help people find the content that is right for them. Playlists are a collection of videos that cover a similar topic. Using playlists helps to boost SEO for your videos on YouTube since they will be easy to find. When creating your playlist put your most popular videos first. Your popular videos are what YouTube will put into people’s recommendations and from there they can discover the other content that you make. The last thing I want to talk about is the end screen for videos. At this point in the video, you want the person that just watched your video to take an action (Jones, 2020). This could be as simple as watching another video from yourself or subscribing to your channel. YouTube makes this easy by providing ways for you to build those options in their backend. Once again doing this will help to boost SEO for your videos.

Let us switch gears here and talk about LinkedIn. LinkedIn does a few great things like having the ability to create a post, publish an article, or upload videos to the platform. Let us start with posts here. You will want to copy the format of what makes other people’s posts successful (Jones, 2020). If you keep up with the current trend, then you can engage with your audience. You will want to make your headlines for posts concise, so people understand what they are about to read. You will want to use keywords and images like this will make the posts more appealing for people to stop scrolling and take a read (Jones, 2020). Typically, you will want to make posts about twice a week and during business hours.

When uploading videos to LinkedIn you have a near-limitless potential of what you can post. You could do a product demo for a new product that your company is releasing or interviews with people in your industry. You can also use it to review different content such as video games to keep people informed of what is happening and if the product is good or not. You will want to use hashtags in the video description (Jones, 2020). The hashtags should be keywords and be relevant to the topic that is being covered in the video. Much like with posts makes sure the thumbnail is attractive and keep the image short. Also, get people to share your video! Next, we will look at how to evaluate if your content is making an impact.

Evaluating Impact

After you have gone through the process of creating your content for social media you now need to evaluate if it worked. When evaluating your social media content, you want to make sure your content is reaching the right audience (Jones, 2020). As previously mentioned, look at the demographics and see if there is any disconnect with the audience you are trying to reach (Jones, 2020). You will want to look at some metrics of the social media platforms to find out if your content marketing is working. Here some are metrics for the different social media platforms (Jones, 2020):

• Twitter
  • Views
  • Retweets
• LinkedIn
  • Views
  • Likes
  • Comments
  • Shares
• YouTube
  • Views
  • Likes/Dislikes
  • Shares

You want these metrics to be high and see which content metrics are higher. Higher metrics mean that you can keep track of what is working and what is not working with your content marketing. You can try the use of interactive content to increase these metrics. Also, keep track of where people are being referred from. Use a tool like Google Analytics to see which social media sites people are coming from (Jones, 2020). The analytics can help to determine if you should stop or increase usage on a particular social media platform.

Another important factor to evaluate is social media sentiment. “Social media sentiment is the emotion, attitude or opinion about a business’s social presence being either positive, negative or neutral” (Jones, 2020). You can set up a listening centre that will help you to monitor sentiment. You can use tools such as Hootsuite or BrandWatch to help you. The benefits of using these tools are (Jones, 2020):

• Filter by sentiment
• Track sentiment over time
• Track competitor’s sentiment

If you do happen to find negative sentiments towards your business, it is important to respond quickly. Responding to comments shows that you are listening to your audience and value their opinions. Now let us wrap up this blog with the most important section of what did I learn.

What Did I Learn?

I want to discuss one section of this blog in more detail in this section. I want to focus on the power of partnering with influencers. In the gaming space partnering with influencers is a new movement. Now, why are game developers starting to make this move? The biggest reason is that an influencer has an audience they can draw from. An influencer’s audience can range from small to big and most are making the move to support small influencers. Game developers are starting to realize that just because a person has a large audience it does not mean that they are the audience you want to be associated with your brand. Smaller influencers present an opportunity to understand their audience and see if they would be a fit with your brand.

If these influencers dig your game, they can be a big part of creating content for you. Influencers can create videos and post them on social media tagging your company. You then can show off these influencers and use these videos in upcoming content. Game developers will invite influencers to their studios to give them a tour and show off what they have been working on. Most influencers will record a video of the studio and post it to their YouTube channel. This gives your audience a unique perspective of how your studio works and operates.

This is going to be the end of part 2 of the content marketing series. Thank you for taking the time to read my blog. If you are interested in checking out the LinkedIn Learning video just click on the link. If you enjoyed this, please subscribe to get updates on when the new blogs come out, and most important share the blog!! Also, you can connect with me on LinkedIn and lets chat!

References

Jones, C. (2020, March 6). Content Marketing for Social Media. Retrieved from LinkedIn Learning: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/content-marketing-for-social-media/accelerate-your-content-marketing-on-social-media?u=2109516