Still trying to figure out how you should be spending your social media marketing time?
Use social media to drive traffic to content hubs.
To be more effective, you need a social media marketing success plan with 4 basic components:
1. ”Content Hubs”
Select appropriate “content hubs” — those websites where you’ll place your content and drive traffic. Your content hub might just be your website, or it could be your website, your blog, and your Facebook page. These content hubs should contain your lead generation offers, such as e-newsletter sign-up, white paper downloads, etc.
The idea is to place valuable content on content hubs for 3 reasons: a) as an attraction for search engine spiders, b) as “link bait” to encourage other websites and blogs to link to this valuable content, and c) to help educate and provide useful tools for prospects.
Once you have your content hubs in place — stocked with useful content focused on your target audiences — then you’re ready to drive traffic to these content locations and try to capture leads.
2. Traffic Drivers
Select the appropriate social networks where your prospects hang out. To do this, you can:
- Search for your customer names on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks you may be interested in, to see how many of your current customers are active on each network. (On Twitter, select “who to follow” and then search for individual names.)
- Search for conversations on each social network covering logical topics your prospects may be interested in. On LinkedIn, search for Groups that are either related to your industry or related to your topic. You can view each Group to see number of members, and which contacts within your network are members.
When you locate a social network where your customers participate, and a community seems to exist around either your industry or related topics, you’ve found a network where you should participate.
Request membership in appropriate LinkedIn groups (you can join up to 50), and continue to build your LinkedIn contact list and Twitter follow list. Whenever you have new useful content posted on your Content Hub(s), send a LinkedIn update to your contact list, post an update to appropriate groups, and send a Tweet to your Twitter followers to drive traffic.
3. Content Curation
All of your tweets and updates should deliver valuable links to recipients, as well as help position you as an expert in your particular area. In addition to links to your own content, you should also act as content “curator”; when you come across content elsewhere that might be helpful to your audience, send tweets and updates to make your audience aware of this additional valuable content.
4. Network Participation
Finally, become an active participant in your chosen social networks. Reply to interesting tweets, and retweet other Twitter users’ useful information. Participate in conversations on other blogs, within LinkedIn groups, and directly with your LinkedIn contacts. For any comments on your own blog, LinkedIn company page (which now can include updates from you), or Facebook fan page, be sure you reply promptly and try to further the conversation with each comment poster.
As you formulate and review your own social media marketing plan, focus on these 4 components of social media marketing success — to drive more traffic to your content hubs, become a more valuable resource, and make new contacts.
Are there other key components of social media marketing strategy that you would add?
Rock solid post. The concept of a content hub really resonated for me.
Thanks for your post, Jim. I think the idea of “Content Hubs” really helps to direct both social media strategy and “content marketing.”
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