7 Social Media Hacks For Promoting Content Marketing
Let’s start with the bad news first. It’s tougher than ever to get content noticed.Changes to Google search results pages have further obscured content organically, especially on competitive commercial searches. Meanwhile,
paid search
costs per click (CPCs) are at all-time highs in established markets.
Organic reach in social media? It’s pretty much dead. Half of all content gets zero shares, and less than 0.1 percent is shared more than 1,000 times.
Additionally, the typical internet marketing conversion rate is less than one percent.
When Content Marketing Doesn’t (Usually) Work
How does content marketing actually work? Many people’s content marketing strategy basically consists of a three-step process:
- Create new content.
- Share your content on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).
- People buy your stuff.
Nope. This almost never happens. (For a content marketing strategy that actually works, try a documented plan such as the Content Marketing Pyramid™.)
Most content goes nowhere. The consumer purchase journey isn’t a straight line—and it takes time.
So is there a more reliable way to increase leads and sales with content?
Social Media Advertising
To The Rescue!
Now it’s time for the good news! Social media advertising
provides the most scalable content promotion and is proven to turn visitors into leads and customers.
And the best part? You don’t need a huge ad budget.
A better, more realistic process for promoting content marketing looks like this:
- Create - Produce content and share it on social media.
- Amplify - Selectively promote your top content on social media.
- Tag - Build your remarketing audience by tagging site visitors with a cookie.
- Filter -
Apply behavioural and demographic filters on your audience.
- Remarketing - Remarket to your audience with display ads, social ads, and remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) to promote offers.
- Convert - Capture qualified leads or sales.
- Repeat.
You can use the following 5 Twitter and Facebook advertising hacks as a guide to get more visitors viewing your content, or as an accelerant to create an even larger traffic explosion.
1. Improve Your Quality Score
Quality Score is the metric Google uses to rate the quality and relevance of your keywords and PPC ads, and influences your cost-per-click. Facebook calls their version a “Relevancy Score”:
While Twitter’s is called a “Quality Adjusted Bid”.
Whatever it’s called, Quality Score is a crucial metric. The way to increase Twitter and Facebook Quality Scores is to increase post engagement rates.
A high Quality Score is great: you get a higher ad impression share for the same budget at a lower cost per engagement. On the flip side, a low Quality Score sucks: you get a low ad impression share and a high cost per engagement.
How do you increase engagement rates? Promote your best content—your unicorns (the top 1-3 percent of content that performs better than everything else) rather than your donkeys (the bottom 97 percent of your content).
To figure out if your content is a unicorn or donkey, test it out.
- Post lots of stuff (organically) to Twitter and use Twitter Analytics to see which content gets the most engagement.
- Post your top stuff from Twitter organically to LinkedIn and Facebook. Again, track which posts get the most traction.
- Pay to promote the unicorns on Facebook and Twitter.
2. Increase Engagement With Audience Targeting
Targeting all your fans isn’t precise; it’s lazy and wastes a lot of money.
Your fans aren’t all the same. They all have different incomes, interests, values, and preferences.
Keyword targeting and other audience targeting methods helps turn average ads into unicorns.
3. Generate Free Clicks From Paid Social Media Advertising
On Twitter, tweet engagements are the most popular type of ad campaign. Why? I have no idea. You have to pay for every user engagement (whether someone views your profile, expands your image, expands your tweet from the tweet stream, or clicks on a hashtag).
If you’re doing this, you need to stop it - now! It’s a waste of money and offers the worst ROI.
Instead, pay only for the thing that matters most to your business, whether it’s clicks to your website, app installs, followers, leads, or actual video views.
For example, when you run a Twitter followers campaign, you pay only when someone follows you. But your tweet promoting one of your unicorn pieces of content will also get a ton of impressions, retweets, replies, mentions, likes, and visits to your website. All for the low, low cost of £0.00
4. Implement Rich Social Sharing Snippits and boost your brand
This is another strategy you can use to promote your blog content without really promoting your blog content.
Some people on sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc. don’t like when all a profile shares is just titles and links back to their blog.
To make your social profiles more appealing to more people you have to share what appears to be 'social media only' content.
Here is how to do it.
Step 1 – Find A Post And Pull Out 3 to 5 Snippets
This can be a new post or it can be an old post.
Read through the content and look for key points or snippets that will make great social content on their own. It can be anything your reader would find valuable or interesting.
If you were creating the 10 Ways To Unclog Your Drain article, one of the snippets you would pull out would be one of the points that were included in the post.
Quotes, stats and other items make for good updates too.
Step 2 – Schedule The Snippets Using Buffer
Take your three snippets and share them using Buffer. This will allow you to share multiple snippets at once instead of having to do it throughout the day, which you can still do if you have the time.
Step 3 – Share Short Tips That Wouldn’t Make Worthwhile Blog Posts
Sometimes you’ll come across ideas or tips in your work that are worthwhile to share via social media, but aren’t worthwhile as a blog post.
This happens all the time with sports writers. They write entire feature articles about players and coaches, but for simple facts like try out information or even quick stats that they find whilst researching it makes more sense to share them on social media.
You can take this same approach. Share the simple, short tips on social media to add more value to your social media updates. Your followers will appreciate that you’re not bombarding them with blog links all the time and if your snippets are good they’ll want to visit your blog anyway to get the really good content.
5. Hacking RankBrain for boosting your SEO
Google is using an AI machine learning system called RankBrain to understand and interpret long-tail queries, especially on queries Google has never seen before—an estimated 15 percent of all queries.
I believe Google is examining user engagement metrics (such as click-through rates, bounce rates, dwell time, and conversion rates) as a way - in part, to rank pages that have earned very few or no links.
Even if user engagement metrics aren’t part of the core ranking algorithm, getting really high organic CTRs and conversion rates has its own great rewards:
- More clicks and conversions.
- Better organic search rankings.
- Even more clicks and conversions.
For example, research found a 19 percent lift in paid search conversion volume and a 10 percent improvement in cost per action (CPA) with exposure to Facebook ads for the financial services company Experian.
Use social media advertising to build brand recognition and double your organic search clickthrough and conversion rates!
6. Social Media Remarketing
Social media remarketing, on average, boosts engagement by three times and doubles conversion rates, while cutting your costs by a third. Make the most of it!
Use social media remarketing to push your hard offers, such as sign-ups, consultations, and downloads.
7. Combine Paid Search & Social Media Advertising
For our final, and most advanced hack of them all, we combine social media advertising with PPC search ads on Google using Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA).
RLSA is incredibly powerful. You can target customised search ads specifically to people who have recently visited your site when they search on Google. It increases click-through and conversion rates by three times and reduces cost-per-click by a third.
There’s one problem. By definition, RLSA doesn’t target people who are unfamiliar with your brand. This is where social media advertising comes in: it helps more people become familiar with your brand.
Social media advertising is a cheap way to start the process of biasing people towards you. While they may not need what you’re selling now, later, when the need arises, people are much more likely to do a branded search for your stuff, or click on you during an unbranded search because they remember your compelling content.
If your content marketing efforts are struggling, these ridiculously powerful Twitter and Facebook advertising hacks will turn your content donkeys into unicorns! Looking for more hacks to supercharge your content ROI? Kangaroo UK enables more consistent content publication, supports your created content strategy, and helps you keep track of your favourite information.