Part Three – The “Content Powerhouses” of Social Media; Bringing it all Together
In my last two blogs, I’ve set the table for the idea that your business can benefit from having a presence on each of today’s popular social networking sites, and went through “The Big Three”. In this third and final part of this blog series, I’d like to take a moment to dive into some of the more “obscure” popular social networking sites – places where the opportunity is there for anyone with a solid gameplan to take advantage of.
These sites, as I like to refer to them as the “Content Powerhouses”, have one primary purpose – uploading and sharing content. Let’s take a look through each of them:
YouTube
Primarily used for: Video content.
How you can penetrate the market: YouTube is entirely video-driven, and often times this scares people away from the site if they don’t the content, time or money to produce videos. However, having a YouTube account still has its benefits. As a partner of Google, a presence on YouTube also allows a presence on the remainder of the Google family of social media platforms (Google+, Gmail, YouTube). One login allows access to all three sites, and while this is handy, it’s even handier that simply having a presence on Google+ immediately helps bolster your search ranking online… People sometimes fail to consider that having a presence on Google helps with their subsequent page rank with Google, and it’s still a fruitful endeavor for those looking for an edge in the continually evolving world of SEO.
Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr
You’ll notice I’ve lumped the final three sites together. In fact, odds are pretty good that best practices for each of these above sites being to look similar the more you dive into what works and what doesn’t. The key with Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr is, and this should no longer be a surprise, quality content – most often image based, though videos still carry weight if the content is engaging.
Best practices here – keep your content brief and instantly engaging (people fly through each of these sites and rarely stop unless something catches their eye). Among all other content sharing sites, these three are notorious for a userbase that simply wants to share “cool stuff they found” with their friends. Cheatsheets, tutorials and other quick, informative posts are great content for these sites.
Indeed the unifying theme for any social media presence you intend to build up is the creation and sharing of quality, timely content that doesn’t sell anything to the end-user directly. In the post-information age, people are looking to share content that’s relevant to them. Learning your audience’s needs is the key to unlocking the content you’ll want to share, and hopefully this article has given you a better idea as to how you should strategically be releasing it. Never be afraid to try – so long as you’re not appearing to be selling and your content speaks to your organization and industry, chances are that you’re doing more good than bad for your brand, whether the results show up in the form of more customers or a better page ranking in search (which will help ultimately help lead to more customers).