Making a great website without a network of website links is like building the perfect car–runs on water, super luxurious, never breaks down–but it’s sitting in the middle of a field far from anywhere and there are no signs leading to it. If you want people to see it, you need signs. No signs, no sales. On the web, links are signposts. Links with lots of impressions are like signs in Times Square—they get lots of views. Links with few eyeballs are like a yard sign on a country road. So the secret to getting your website seen is to have links where lots of people can see them, such as in a social media account with thousands of followers or in an ad that gets thousands of impressions.
The Missing Link to Content Marketing
People seem to understand that great content can attract and engage people. What they often fail to understand is how to get people to actually see that great content in the first place. Say you make an Instagram account and every day you post a clever meme that’s related to your business. You figure that your clever memes are sure to engage people and then they’ll click on your home link. That’s not how it works. You can post a million brilliant memes, but unless you have followers who have discovered your account, those memes will not lead to a single connection with your website. So what’s missing? That’s simple: you need a community—a group of engaged followers who share your clever memes and who visit your website.
How to Build a Town Hall
A town hall is where the community gathers to share ideas, make decisions, and hold events, where everyone is welcome. Everyone in town knows where the town hall is, and they regularly check to see what’s happening there. If you’re going to use social media to drive content marketing, you need your social media accounts to be like town halls. The most important part of building a town hall, of course, is to locate it in the town where it can be found easily and visited by the local community. In the same way, you need to position your social media account in a way that it can be found. You do that through research and developing a strategy. Here are the questions you need to know to begin planning:
- Who are you trying to reach?
- Who else is interested in what you do?
- What keywords are used to search for related things?
- How is your social media account content going to be different than others with a similar audience?
- What social media platforms are best suited for the type of audience and content you will provide?
- What resources can you put into managing your social media efforts, including creating content, monitoring responses, and gaining followers?
Once you have an idea of how you want to position your social media account, you’ll need to generate some sample content, publish it, then begin following prospects. Prospects are other users of that social media platform who create and/or share content that is related or relevant to your own. They and their followers are the most likely to follow your account once they’ve become aware of it. By following them, some of them will likely check out your account, and if they like what they see, they’ll follow you back and maybe even share your content. The best prospects are those who have lots of followers and who share lots of content. If they share one of your posts, lots of people will see it and possibly check out your account. Prospects who don’t have a following or don’t publish content are usually of lesser value. But keep in mind that following a celebrity who has millions or hundreds of thousands of followers is not likely to result in any benefit to you. They’re in the business of promoting their own brand, not those of a small business. Instead, look to those who have a related interest to your own, who post fairly regularly, and who share posts. Also, see if they follow others and who they follow. Great content providers who don’t follow anyone won’t follow you. Ideally, these accounts will have a large following (in the hundreds or thousands), they’ll follow other accounts, and they’ll share posts from their followers.
Other Ways to Promote Your Social Media Content
Promoting your content for a given social media account can be as simple as looking at what’s trending and creating related content or using a related hashtag. Or it could involve paying to promote your content to more users than you have followers. The first method is free, but your content needs to be of interest to what’s trending. If the current trending topics and hashtags aren’t related to your focus, it’s better to let it go than fake it. In other words, if #greencomet is a trending hashtag and your account is about bird food, no amount of twisting your topic is going to relate it to the trending topic. As for paying to promote content, don’t dismiss this option. Rates to promote content on a social media platform compare reasonably to many online advertising options. You’ll want to keep track of the number of impressions you get and the number website visits during the time the content is promoted. If you see an uptick in visits, and even better you see an increase in sales or connections, then you can determine the Return on Investment (ROI) of the promotional spend. A second metric is to see how or if a promoted piece of content increases your following on the account. A large increase in followers can be as valuable as a direct contact or sale. Recently, we promoted an online startup for just five days on Facebook and the followers went from under 100 to over 2100 for a spend of $25. Better yet, the demographics were 95% spot on for the retailer.
Yield of Dreams
In the movieField of Dreams, Ray Kinsella builds a baseball field in a cornfield after hearing a mystical message: “If you build it, he will come.” First to come are the baseball heroes of a long-lost era, and later, in an effort to convince Ray to hold onto the farm, Terrance Mann tells Ray, “People will come, Ray.” By the end of the movie people are coming from all over to see the wonder. Likewise, many businesses operate under the misapprehension that if they build a website, customers will flock to it. Unfortunately, life does not imitate art. To yield the results you want, you must guide people to the right location. On the internet, that means providing links to your website in places that people will encounter them. Only then will the magic you seek happen.