If you’ve done any amount of research about how to promote your new website and attract new visitors, you can’t help but have stumbled across the term ‘content marketing’ at least once or twice.
The biggest thing in online marketing over the last few years, the term itself is pretty self-explanatory, referring to the concept of using lots of relevant, engaging content to build up brand awareness and give both potential and existing customers lots of compelling reasons to come back to your site time and time again.
Get them there often enough, and it won’t be long before you’re developing the kind of brand loyalty that leads to increased sales, traffic, and long-term success for your website.
But of course, content in and of itself is rarely enough. After all, what good is having lots of awesome stuff on your website if nobody actually knows it’s there? That’s where social media comes into its own, providing the perfect platform to spread the word about your new content and -if its strong enough- convince others to do the same for you.
If you’re just starting out on your content marketing journey, here’s a few top tips from our experts on how to share your hosted website content on social media.
Getting the perfect image sizes
Image courtesy of Top 10 Website Hosting – http://www.top10-websitehosting.co.uk/
Nine times out of ten, when we go to post a link on our Facebook or Twitter accounts, it turns out that everything looks pretty much as it should, or at least good enough that it wouldn’t look out of place among the countless posts competing for attention on our audience’s news feeds.
Yet have you ever noticed that there’s always that odd occasion when your images are either awkwardly cropped, or simply don’t appear at all?
It doesn’t take much to ensure you’ve got the perfect image sizes for your posts so that they attract attention. Both Facebook and Twitter have their own recommendations for image sizes, and content marketing firm Hubspot have even produced this detailed guide to help you out.
Timing is of the essence
If a tree falls in the woods and nobody’s around to hear it, does it make a sound? Likewise, if a post lands on Facebook and there’s nobody there to look at it, is it making any kind of impact? Whilst we can’t vouch for trees in the woods, it’s a pretty safe bet that content you post on social media is only going to have any kind of success if your audience is actually there to see it.
To that end, it pays to experiment with the timing of your posts when you first get started. Look at which days, and which times of day, produce the best results for your social media content, and build the rest of your content to be delivered accordingly.
Use your free advertising credits to send your content further
If you signed up with a leading hosting company, you were likely given a bunch of free Facebook advertising credits that have probably sat unused in your account ever since. Now’s the time to put them to work in targeting exactly the kind of audience that you want to attract and getting your content pride and place among their Facebook pages.
Add sharing buttons on your content and encourage others to spread the word
Last but not least, the best results from your content marketing won’t actually come from you at all, but from your readers recommending your content to their friends and social networks. Of course, that means it’s going to have to be the best possible quality, but it also means that you should be doing everything you can to encourage sharing, and that includes building social media buttons into your blog posts and other content, so that if somebody does want to share it, all they have to do is click a single button and help you use content marketing to its fullest.