Social Media and Content Marketing Go Hand in Hand

Whether you’re using social media for personal or professional reasons, it plays a role in your everyday routine. We spend around 2 hours and 27 minutes per day, which is a significant amount of time.

Most of the time, people use social media to keep up with friends and family, find new ideas, and stay on top of current trends — but it offers much more than that. As a consumer, you’re often being targeted with ads and organic social posts that resonate with you in your personal life. Whether that’s a new restaurant opening near you, the latest product offering from a favorite brand, or an upcoming event, there always seems to be something being presented to you.

Have you ever stopped to analyze what the content actually looks like that is being pushed out via social media? Sure, you see the traditional promo ads that are aiming to stop you in your tracks and get you to convert when they have a new offer. But what are these companies doing in the interim to keep their brand top-of-mind and engagement high? Queue content marketing.

Using Social Media as a Content Marketing Strategy 

Whether you’re a B2C business trying to sell products or services or a B2B company offering solutions for common pitfalls, utilizing social media and content marketing is incredibly important to your overall strategy. So how do those two methods work together? It’s relatively simple.

Think of all the content that you create around your brand’s offerings. Promotional emails, educational blog posts, downloadable resources, case studies, and testimonials are just a few examples. If you’re already creating these assets to live on your website or serve a purpose for a campaign or even a quarterly review, why can’t they be used across multiple platforms and repurposed in different ways?

The answer is they can. That case study that you just produced showcasing how your business helped a client solve a problem can be used to provide social proof to prospective customers across social media. Use the video footage and create short snippets or sound bites to drive people to your website to watch the full interview. Take quotes from the conversation and turn them into graphics to include as a static social post and even use them in upcoming promotional materials, like emails and paid ads.

What about the how-to guide you just created to offer those who come to your website looking for additional information? Utilize the content within that piece to create motion graphics, static posts, and paid ads, all leading them to the landing page to download for themselves.

You’re already creating great content for your customers, so why keep it from those potential customers who may not even know you exist yet? If you’re not repurposing your content marketing materials across platforms and different use cases, you’re doing yourself a disservice and actually creating more work for yourself.

This is what I like to call the content rule of 3 — for every piece of content you create, there are at least 3 additional ways that you can repurpose or use it. For example, if you host a webinar, you are typically putting in a lot of work for a single moment in time. Once it’s over, it’s important to get strategic with how you can continue to use that content. A few ideas would be uploading the recording onto your website, creating short snippets for social media and emails, and even taking the content from the presentation and turning it into a downloadable resource to generate leads.

The Importance of Utilizing Social Media Platforms 

If you’re only creating content for the purpose of housing it on your website and sending it out via email, you’re doing your brand a disservice by not getting more eyes on it.

Your team put hours and a lot of effort into producing useful materials for your target audience. So unless you have a large database, high traffic to the site, and incredible SEO, people are only going to find you when they’re looking for something specific.

By using social media as another vehicle of delivery for your content marketing materials, you can get in front of those who are within your target persona but don’t even know it. When you combine forces, your reach goes beyond your direct database – don’t let potential new customers miss out on what you can offer them!

*Editor's Note: This blog was originally written in 2015 and has since been updated.