By Olivier Choron, CEO and founder, purechannelapps
We’ve all heard it many times – content is king. This is undeniably a valid fact. Your marketing teams have to create masses of good content, and do so often, to feed your social media activities. Without this regular (and valuable) content, social media simply cannot survive. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Is content production really the only issue you have?
Who follows you, and how far does your content reach?
We’ve all worked hard to grow our follower base. You can grow a massive follower base by promoting content, and engaging in follower tricks like following-back and follow-Fridays, but this doesn’t really attract quality followers. Most of us realise that building a follower base with good numbers and good quality takes a lot of social media hustling, but that’s another story.
So you’ve grown a good follower base in the thousands, perhaps, if you’re lucky, in the tens of thousands. That’s great, but realistically, your content is not going to be seen by most of your followers, and probably quite a bit less (they maybe infrequent users of social media platforms, or your content might be hidden somewhere obscure in their newsfeed).
Whilst you might get a handful of favourites, likes, retweets and shares, your total impressions are unlikely to exceed that of your total followers. More importantly, your content is only likely to be seen by your followers, people who know you, and nobody else.
My point is that it’s no good having killer content if you have no plan other than to distribute it on your own social media networks, to your own followers. You are probably just preaching to the converted! Clearly, you need to be thinking about distribution before you create content.
Adopt the right technology and distribute your content to the correct buying audiences.
There are fantastic technologies that exist today that reduce this pain point in social media content distribution, and in some cases, remove it completely. I may be biased, but I know from personal experience that there are solutions out there that allow vendors and brands to distribute their killer content much, much further, through their partners, retailers, employees and other brand advocates on social media.
By providing your content to your partners, retailers, employees and brand advocates regularly, and letting them post this as their own content on their social networks, you will then be able to maximise your investments in content. You will open exciting previously unreachable new avenues for readership and enable your partners, retailers, employees and brand advocates to generate more interest around your brands and products.
In other words, distributing your social media content efficiently maximises your opportunities for this content. You’ve done the hard work; creating rich and engaging content. Distributing and syndicating it via your interested brand advocates, will deliver the results. So for me, content is king, but distribution is the queen, and she still definitely rules the roost.
Picture credit: lukitascba/Flickr
