How To Customize Content Across Social Media Networks
Each social media channel is different, with a different purpose and different audience mindset. When your audience is hanging out on a channel, they’re in a certain frame-of-mind and if your content doesn’t fit the mood, it can be viewed as an annoyance, or worse, that four-letter word SPAM. There is one common thread, however, and that is every social media channel can be used for building relationships with the target audience.
When sharing content across social media networks, it’s important to customize the content around the best practices for each network. Our company recently launched an eBook and developed a Content Marketing Plan to support the launch of the book. Below is how we customized the content for each of our social media networks.
LinkedIn is a professional networking site. Create content appropriate for sharing at a business presentation, meeting, or group discussion. Here are the tactics we are using to promote our book launch on LinkedIn.
- We created a blog post sharing 27 powerful tips for business blogging. As part of our promotions, we shared the post on LinkedIn, in status updates and started group discussions.
- We created professional images for each of the 27 blogging best practices and will share one daily for the next 27 business days.
- We created a SlideShare, embedded the presentation on our team profiles, and shared the SlideShare in status updates.
The Facebook channel is more personal than LinkedIn. For this channel, create content you would likely share at a family get together, or evening “in” with close friends. For our book launch, we’ve scheduled the following tactics.
- We identified several successful small business blogs and will highlight these blogs in status updates. The blogs we selected offer content that focuses on home, relationships, inspiration, travel, art, and music. This is the content people share most on Facebook. It’s what’s important to us in our personal lives.
- We created a cover image depicting how blogging preserves life’s most important memories, with a link back to our book.
Business Blog
A blog, for us, is one of the most powerful marketing tools in our toolbox. It’s perfect for story-telling, compatible with visual content, and allows us to share in-depth information with our audience. We’ve created an excerpt of the book to show its value, and have made it available on the blog’s most popular posts. Readers who download the excerpt receive a discount when purchasing the full book.
Pinterest is a pinboard-style photo sharing and collection website where users create theme-based boards around things that are important to them. Think of it as looking into the shadowboxes of your audience. It’s personal and each board represents something important in their life. A popular board for many pinners is a resource board, whether to help them with a small business, hobbies, or professional development.
- We created a Tips for SmallBiz Bloggers board to host helpful tips and strategies for bloggers. Our board cover was designed to appeal to lifestyle bloggers because lifestyle is the premise of Pinterest.
For twitter, we have just a few characters to capture our audience. But, photos can also be used very effectively on twitter. Adding photos boosts a tweet to a more noticeable status in the newsfeed. In our book promotions on Twitter, we’re using the following tactics. Our goal with these is to provide blogging examples for our audience to trigger their own ideas and to engage with successful bloggers, by building a sense of community.
- We include use of relevant images in our tweets and highlight the best-of the-best, successful blogs that demonstrate the blogging best practices we’ve identified in the book.
- We include strategic use of relevant keywords with hashtags in our Tweets.
- While we highlight blogging success examples in our Tweets, we share about our book on our Twitter profile in a less invasive manner.
Google+
Our team members have obtained Google Authorship to help advance the content shared on Google+. We’ll use the following tactics for promoting the book on Google+.
- We created blogging tips with images at 720 x 720 pixels and uploaded them to a scrapbook on our Google+ profiles.
- We created a series of posts with blogging tips featuring relevant high-quality images. Images include popular bogs following the best practices we identify in the book.
Bonus: As a bonus, we will host several how-to Webinars, and share instructions for implementing key strategies in the book.
Now it’s your turn, what ideas can you add to this? Share your thoughts in the comments.
