When it comes to marketing your web content nothing is better than some good social media strategies. The whole point of SEO is to drive more traffic to your website through ranking on Google, using social media has the added benefit of driving immediate traffic as well as helping you rank higher in the Google search engine. This two-pronged benefit really is amazing at building up a quick stream of traffic as well as playing things for the long term.
In this article, I am going to assume that you already have a content strategy set in place. I am also going to assume that you are familiar with keyword research and basic link building principles, we aren’t going to talk about those today. Instead, we are going to go over how you can create a strategy to make your content go viral through social media.
We will be going over some general ideas and how you should set up a social media strategy for your content. We recommend also looking up guides (many of which that can be found here) for each individual social media site. Many social media sites behave differently and it is important that you understand all of the nuances with every social media site. This being said the below formula is a great way to finding success.
Market Research
The first thing you will want to do is do some market research. For instance, if you have a site that is about apartments you would probably not advertise it on the same sites as you would a giant B2B business. Before you start making accounts to promote content you will want to make sure that you are making accounts in the right places.
An easy way to do research is to use a program such as import.io to scrape as much information as you can. This will easily allow you to pull all article names and information, then take all of the urls that you get and put them through Google Refine, this will allow you to pull all social information. Do this to all of your competitors and take a look and see where they get the majority of their social shares from, this will let you know where you should be focusing on.
Prepare
The next step is preparing, now that you know which social sites you are going to share your information on this is relatively easy. You will want to start preparing your social media accounts for the promotion. Figure out what groups and forums your community hangs out in and start posting there. Build up an account that is known for helping other people out, this way when you start sharing your content to help others out everyone will feel thankful and not angry for spam.
This is an important step, and it can make or break the difference between you having success or not. When a lot of my clients aren’t having success with their social media strategies the first thing I ask them is what kind of preparation they’ve done to send out the content, they almost always respond with the word “none”. Do the hard work and the results will come.
Influencers
This step is the most important one to take. Look on your social media accounts for the biggest influencers available. If you run a B2B site you will want to look for influencers on LinkedIn that can buy your product. If you have a site that you want to promote over twitter you should consider using services such as Follower Wonk. By doing these types of things you will know where you can spread your quality content.
Another thing you may want to do is email influencers in your niche. If you can create a good relationship you can generally get them to promote your content through their social media. The key is to create a good relationship and offer them something in return. Building up these types of relationships can be powerful and allow you to really get involved with some influencers in your niche.
Reach Out
This is the part that you’ve been building up to. Go through all of your social media accounts and reach out to the influencers. If you’re really looking at succeeding try reaching out to them a few days ahead of time and letting them know that you like their work. This way when you sare the content with them it will be a continued part of a conversation, not a random spam message with a link.
If you reach out well and do things correctly it will be easy for you to promote content in the future. I like to keep a big list of influencers that I have contact with in a few different industries so that I know where I can push my content to every time I have something new to send out. I recommend that you do the same if you plan on seriously promoting your content through social media.
Repeat
This is the last part, rinse and repeat. Keep in contact as much as possible with these influencers and keep sending them more content to promote. Also be sure to promote any of their content if they want you to. These kind of relationships are powerful and soon enough promoting your content on social media will be relatively easy. The more you repeat this process the easier it will be to drive traffic.
Conclusion
Setting up a good social media campaign is not difficult. It may be tough to get off of the ground at first but the upside is once you have things really going life gets a whole lot easier. Suddenly sending a blast of a few hundred visitors when you first post an article won’t be super difficult.
The big plus of using social media is it will provide a big boost of traffic while you wait for your sites to rank in the long term. This means that you will be able to instantly create traffic as well as gain rankings. Some SEO’s theorize that Google pays attention to social signals and so far we have seen a good positive correlation as well. If this is true than it is well worth the effort to promote your content through social media.
