Content marketing in social media

Businesses struggle to find out best social media strategy for their product. With plethora of online marketing tools to manage different channels, marketing executives can follow few basic steps while developing social media strategy, which can also affect search channel and help drive conversions.

First, the company should find out the objective of using social media i.e. brand awareness, brand favorability, increase traffic on the web, customer care or all of the above. Second, social media strategy will be successful when targeted effectively. The company should invest time in finding out right segment of market or customer for the product. In addition, since multiple outlets can drive up the cost of maintaining social media channels, appropriate tool such as Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Twitter should be chosen. Third, any social media tool such as Sysomos, Radian, Lithium6 etc provides analytics for the campaigns or for the company owned pages that can be further be leveraged for further insights and future improvement ideas.

Content marketing including creating articles, blogs, optimized product pages, creative copy, product videos and pushing them to all social media channels increases brand awareness, allows brand/product consideration and helps drive conversions. Increase in new visitors to the website indicates in increased awareness. At the same time, quality can improves search rankings, leading to higher sustained organic traffic to the website. Not involving customers is one pitfall to avoid as higher engagement on the in-house generated content or blogs or videos will increase relevancy of the posts in social media (or Edgerank of Facebook). In addition, content should posted should not always talk about the product but should highlight value to the customer and share success stories from within the community. When customer moves through the next stage of consideration, increase in average time spent on the web page or on mobile application, lower bounce rate, and other social metrics indicate that the customer is continuously engaged and considered buying the product. Articles, white papers, newsletters, FAQs, web page content and blog posts impact customer's consideration. Finally, increased conversion rate can be measured by sales, leads for each campaign or referrers. Once customers purchase the product, people share their stories on the social media, which further influence social media awareness and search.