A great way to promote website content is through social media, but without a clear direction it can get fairly difficult.
With the abundance of social media content in today’s environment, it’s easy to get lost in the mix.
While social media is a great tool to promote your brand and getting your name out there, it can be difficult to do when millions of others are trying to do the same thing.
In a society driven by media, we need to figure out a way to cut through the noise. Noise in the social media sense is how much consumption is happening every 60 seconds. For example, every minute there are 2.78 million video views on YouTube and 347,222 tweets. With all that content out there it may seem daunting to gain notoriety and attention.
There are varying ways, as a brand, to cut through that noise to reach your target audience.
Ways to Promote Website Content Through Social Media
Using Visuals
One organic way to promote website content through social media is by using visual components.
If you’re going after a group of people who might be more visually inclined, make sure to include more media content than worded stories. Just because you’re trying to tell a story doesn’t necessarily mean you have to write it. Using tools like infographics and Prezi are a great way to go about presenting these visuals.
Think about incorporating images for each main point in your article. This will give your content a better chance of being shared on different social media platforms.
Infographics are a great example of this. An infographic is a graphic visual image such as a chart or diagram used to represent information or data. Infographics are an incredibly efficient way to show data and how it’s applicable.
You’ve heard of the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words.” In 2016 it’s “a good infographic is worth a thousand words.”
Prezi gives you the ability to tell a story or present content in a unique manner that can captivate someone. Both have mobile capability, therefore allowing you to better reach your social media audience and promote your content.
The Art of Creating a Headline
Another organic way to promote your content is simply by creating impactful headlines.
“On the average, five times as many people
read the headlines as read the body copy.”
David Ogilvy, “The Father of Advertising”
So why are headlines so important? It’s because they’re the first lines of your copy that customers read. They create an initial impression that either draws readers in or pushes them away.
You want to make sure the headline is grabbing people’s attention. With that in mind, you need to create a title with the purpose of having it be shared on social media.
4 U’s of Headline Writing
The 4 U’s of Headline Writing are well known throughout the advertising and copywriting worlds.
1 Your headline should convey a sense of urgency
2 Your headline should be unique
3 Your headline should be ultra-specific
4 Your headline should be useful
One way to use twitter as a simple brand promotion is by pinning a tweet on your timeline. You can have the tweet be a link to your website; since it’s pinned, it will stay at the top of your timeline. This is an effective way to manipulate a person’s attention to what you want them to see.
LinkedIn allows you to promote your website content through your profile. The Experience section of your LinkedIn profile allows you to add content about your past or present positions. You can upload graphics and link videos, add volunteer experiences and projects. All of this allows you to add searchable content to the Internet using keywords relevant to your business while promoting yourself in a more professional social media setting.
Paid Advertising
In addition to having a strong organic promotion of content, there needs to be a mixture of paid advertising as well. This is because less than 1% of organic social media gets any kind of engagement, making it hard to get noticed solely through organic methods.
One example of paid advertising is the pay to play method. This is the concept of paying social media platforms to promote your content. This gives your content a spot in the news feeds of social media users, which guarantees visibility from a target audience.
Using Facebook advertising is an excellent way to pay to promote through social media. In a test done by socialmediaexaminer.com, 90% of marketers reportedly use Facebook ads opposed to the second most LinkedIn (20%). This is because Facebook has such a large audience and there are an incredible amount of niche pages and audiences that make it more practical to use. While LinkedIn attracts more professional audiences, Facebook has the range of old and young demographics who express their likes and dislikes much more prevalently.
High Quality Content
Both through paid and organic advertising the point remains the same: deliver your message effectively and concisely. Make sure your content is of high quality and not confusing or uninformative.
You need to ensure your brand is being promoted in a captivating way so as to ensure you’re grabbing the audiences’ attention quickly. People are used to scrolling through newsfeeds so fast that they hardly take the time to stop and read what people are actually writing.
That’s why you need to make sure you’re giving the target audience compelling content that tells a story. If your advertisement comes across as, well, an advertisement, people will be less likely to stop and read what you have to say. People want to know how they can relate to a product or brand, and how it may influence their daily lives.