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5 ways to make your content social media friendly

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5 ways to make your content social media friendly

5 ways to make your content social media friendly

Do you often worry that your content is not being shared on social media and social networking websites?

Aren’t people paying attention to your content or they are not motivated to share it on their social media timelines?

If this is the problem, are you publishing social media friendly content?

What exactly do we mean by “social media friendly” content?

Although it is very important that people abundant share your content on social media, before going ahead with sharing my other thoughts with you, I would like to stress that don’t overtly worry about the social media. Write and publish useful content and make it easy for people to share it and the rest automatically.

There was a time when people knew of Internet by email.

Many people thought that if you were checking email, you were “Interneting”.

Yes, they were familiar with the concept of websites, but it was mostly email.

The same happens with social media these days.

It is so prevalent that many people, people who haven’t used the Internet much before, think that it’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that are Internet rather than millions of websites.

In rural India, shopkeepers selling Mobile Sim cards or people running mobile repair shops are charging Rs. 50 to install Facebook on mobile phones and many think that Facebook itself is the Internet. They access the web for the first time through Facebook.

This means that social media and social networking websites have grown into a totally separate entity and for the purpose of content marketing ignoring these websites is like ignoring the telephone or the email while trying to do business in the contemporary world.

Just as you need good search engine rankings to promote your content, you also need to optimize your content for social media and this is what you mean by making your content “social media friendly”.

Your content is social media friendly when

  • People feel like sharing it on their timelines (Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn)
  • They don’t need to modify your headlines and descriptions in order to share your links
  • Sharing your content is just a matter of a couple of clicks

Why do these traits matter? Why do they make a big difference in the way people share your content on social media and social networking websites?

Most of the sharing on social media is instinctive. Sure, professionals like me take extra pains to share stuff even when it is unfriendly and difficult to share, but a normal user doesn’t take extra pains.

Hence, your content should be very easily shareable, preferably, just through a single or a couple of clicks or taps.

Previously I used to think that why bother with people who don’t want to make much effort to share your content, but then I realized that it is not about these individuals.

Even if they themselves are not interested enough to go to extra lengths, your content gets visibility and it may reach people who are more serious about what you have to say.

Why it is important for your content to get social media visibility?

Take for example Facebook. There are more than 2.45 billion monthly active users over there. On daily basis, 1.62 million people use Facebook actively. 7 in 10 US adults use Facebook (source). 89% marketers use Facebook for brand marketing (source).

LinkedIn has more than 575 million users and 260 million monthly active users (source).

On an average, people spend 3 hours on social media and social networking websites. 54% consumers use social media to research products before buying (source).

Many social networking companies, including Facebook, are taking measures that when people switch on their phones, they log into Facebook in the beginning itself so that whatever activities they carry out, they do them within the Facebook ecosystem.

I’m not saying I endorse such developments, but it shows that an increasing number of people might be doing most of their activities, including communication, newsgathering, product evaluation and buying and selling, within social networking ecosystems.

Advertising and PPC campaigns are always an option, but you can increase your reach by writing and publishing social media friendly content on a regular basis. Interactive posting of content, especially created by brands and businesses themselves, get more attention from social media users compared to advertisements.

For a very long time I have been thinking of dabbling with infographics.

I recently tried to work with a neighborhood graphic designer but although she is good at using image manipulation tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, she was terribly lacking on the creative side.

We were working on a project and I had to tell her practically everything.

The only blessing was that whatever I told her she was able to accomplish it.

Anyway, this is the infographic that I have created titled 5 ways to make your content social media friendly. It isn’t much but it’s definitely a beginning.

5 ways to make your content social media friendly

The five ways are:

  1. Create compelling headlines: Your headlines are, as far as optimizing your content for social media goes, the most important aspects of your content.Compelling in this context means they should invoke strong feelings, so strong that people should be driven to share your content on their timelines.
  2. Publish irresistible content: In my daughter’s social sciences book there is a headline that goes something like this, “one man’s garbage is another’s treasure”.It is about the garbage collectors who make money off the garbage we throw away so thoughtlessly.

    So what is irresistible and what is not, depends on individual need, but catering to your niche, create content that is highly useful and valuable.

    It should solve some purpose and this is why people will share your content.

    When sharing your content people must feel that they are doing a service to their friends and followers.

    Always think: why would people share what you’re writing?

  3. Use social buttons: It’s easier to share content when you just have to click a button.I like the way you can share certain portions of blog posts and articles published on Medium.

    The relevant, share-worthy portions have a Twitter icon nearby. You just need to click the icon to broadcast that particular sentence.

  4. Use social optimization tags: These tags normally reside in the header area of your web page.In a typical web page there are already title, description and keywords tags.

    You can also have dedicated tags for Facebook and Twitter to instruct various social media and social networking channels to automatically pick up customized headings and descriptions rather than using the default ones.

    If you are using WordPress to manage your website or blog, you can easily get plug-ins to achieve this.

  5. Choose publishing time carefully: You will need some time to figure out during what time of the day your target audience is most active on social media and social networking websites.Publish your content when there is greatest chance of it being noticed and shared.
  6. Publish different content for different social media platforms: Content consumption on different platforms have different patterns.Content that is suitable for LinkedIn may not be suitable for Facebook and content that is suitable for Facebook may not be suitable for Twitter. Repeated testing will tell you which type of content in your industry performs better on which social media platform.

 

My understanding of social media marketing

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It has become a cliché I know, “social media marketing” but then every trend sooner or later, as more and more people begin to adopt it and begin to claim themselves as experts in, becomes a cliché.

As it often happens with me my entry into the world of social media has been a bit lackluster. I have been interacting on Facebook and Twitter and have also been providing consulting services to some of my regular clients but when it comes to my own presence on social media I haven’t been very particular. Actually, the same thing happened with my blog too. When I was helping other people promote their blogs I was totally neglecting my own blog. Anyway, this post is about my understanding of social media marketing.

Social media marketing

What exactly is social media marketing? Does it merely mean creating profiles on various social media and networking websites and posting content, and on and off interacting with your friends and followers? This is not marketing, this is simple networking and communication and your mom must already be doing this among her circle of old friends and relatives.

Marketing is a bad word, I know but it is a necessary evil, if you want to call it so. Out of the negative shade it is an activity that makes people aware of the services and products you offer.

Conventional marketing is mostly one-way: you create advertisements for television, newspapers, magazines, and even on the Internet (remember banner and link ads?). You can even publish pamphlets and fliers and get them distributed or mailed. After being exposed to your advertisement people may or may not respond. It depends on how well the advertisement has been created and what is the demand for your product or service.

Social media marketing on the other hand creates ripe ground for marketing. And it’s not just marketing in its pure sense. You may like to call it brand awareness. You don’t necessarily call it marketing because on social media and networking websites people are not very big fans of marketing and business promotion. It happens but it happens in the form of communication. Social media marketing in its true essence means

  • You remain active
  • You keep interacting with your friends and followers
  • You keep them engaged
  • You inform them
  • You educate them and seek advice
  • You let it be known through your fan or profile page what you do for a living and what sort of business to promote
  • You encourage discussions around your product or service, unobtrusively
  • You constantly measure response and take further steps accordingly
  • You reach out to new people and make old people feel valued
  • So on and so forth

You cannot simply put a page there and expect people to start doing business with you. You need to establish a long-term relationship with them. You have to show them that you are interested in them, that you are concerned about their welfare, that it matters to you how they think and what they think, you are there to help within your means, and in between, if they need something and you happen to be selling it, suggest that they can get it from you.

Benefits of social media marketing

There are many benefits of engaging your present and prospective customers/clients on social media and networking websites.

  • You create relationships instead of customers and clients
  • You actually interact with people as an individual
  • The communication is more focused and targeted
  • It is an ongoing process so there is greater brand awareness
  • People become more familiar with your presence and may even respond better to your conventional advertising campaigns
  • You can develop a stand-alone platform to launch products and services
  • You can obtain instant feedback and react accordingly
  • If there is a public-relations problem you have a ready-made communication tool with you through which you can reach hundreds of thousands of eager listeners instantly
  • You can educate people with real-time interaction
  • You can analyze the metrics of conversion with greater and more predictable accuracy
  • You can show your human side to your customers and clients
  • You can strike up new, amazing friendships
  • You can get new product ideas by carefully listening to your social media audience

There can be many more benefits but these are the immediate once that come to my mind.

So should your organization invest in social media? Again, “invest” sounds a bit mercantile but what I mean is investment in terms of effort and money. Of course as a busy person you wouldn’t like to update your Facebook and Twitter accounts multiple times a day and beside you need to be very careful about what activities to indulge in through your social media presence, especially if you are representing your business. You have to define guidelines and you have to strategise your activities. Although social media marketing is an ongoing activity you have to move towards long-term and short-term objectives. Your every single posting and interaction must take you one step forward towards those objectives.

For this, you need help. You will need professional help: people who know the inns and outs of social media and who can take positive decisions for you. This is where investment comes in because you will have to pay them for their time. Social media is fun only as long as you’re doing it for yourself; if you want to do it for others you expect decent compensation because it is a serious job. The person, after all, represents your business. Everything he or she says reflects upon you (your business); hence, it requires lots of maturity, experience and tact to interact with your followers and friends on social media on your behalf. I will be writing more about this in my forthcoming blog posts.