So you’ve created a Facebook page for your company and a LinkedIn profile. Your business has a Twitter profile and you might be considering Google+ or Pinterest. You have social media visibility, but do you have a presence?
It all depends on what you’re posting.
Different sources provide different ratios for how much of your social media content should be self-promotional versus informational, but the verdict is clear on the necessity of both. Informational posts position your company as an industry expert and have the potential to expose your product or service to customers before your sales team even picks up the phone. The earlier you can make an impression in your customers’ buying process, the more likely you are to land the client.
So where is all of this quality content supposed to come from? Chances are, you’re already sitting on tons of it. Any technical material that your organization has produced to walk potential buyers through the purchasing process is ideal for social media posts. That can include everything from white papers and PowerPoint presentations to product brochures and sales scripts. The key to unlocking the power of these items as compelling social media content is knowing how to repurpose the message:
Use “teasing education”: Repurpose a product demo as a YouTube video and post only the first thirty or sixty seconds of it. Ask your community to visit your booth at an upcoming trade show appearance or check out your website to see the remainder of the demo.
Extract nine lives out of every piece: Turn a presentation or a product training video into a Slide Share presentation or a webinar (see “26 Webinar Tools for Small Business Owners” on SmallBizTrends.com for the how-to). Turn the webinar into a podcast. Turn the podcast into a blog post. Turn quotes from the blog post into attention-getting visuals for Twitter and Facebook. Comb through the feedback you get from all of these channels to find an angle for a press release. All of these make for valuable, informative social media posts.
Create and contribute guest posts: Do you have a channel partner or a vendor whose products or service compliments your own? Gain exposure with a new audience and expand your presence by taking any piece of repurposed content you’ve shared with your communities and share it as a guest post.
Does your organization use techniques that aren’t covered here? Share them in the comments. For more tips on how businesses of any size can cost-efficiently reach their customers, follow, friend and connect with us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
