Using this knowledge in your content marketing strategy enables you to be successful in your implementation, and to identify the tremendous opportunities social media marketing can provide your brand and business as a whole.

The big question is: How can you best leverage social media as part of your content marketing platform? The answer revolves around one simple rule: Social media represents the convergence of information and communication. Social media users are therefore consuming more content and are hungry for your information. If you don’t provide it to them, they will consume your competitor’s content.

Based on my own experience with clients as well as for my personal brand, I have defined the following ten commandments. If you internalize and follow these you’ll get the best results from your social media marketing efforts.

You don’t have to be a religious person. But try to remember to internalize these ten commandments as best as possible. Once you do, all of this will come naturally to you over time.

One: I Will Only Post to Relevant Social Networks

There are many benefits to every social media platform. It is in social media where you can find your target audience, and this is where your connections begin. Having said that, I do not advise spreading your resources on each of the available social media channels, especially when some are more relevant to your business than others.

Only post appropriate content to appropriate social networks. This sounds easy enough. But too many companies simply try to amplify all of their content on all of their social media platforms. It’s a waste of time. Get into the mindset of only posting relevant content on relevant social networks.

I do A/B testing to find the right social channels to invest time in with my clients. I advise you to do the same.

Two: I Will Optimize My Content for Each Social Network

When posting content, always optimize it for that social network. Consider it an exercise in repurposing your content for social.

When optimizing your content for each social network, remember that each site is like its own country. It has its own community, its own way of doing things, and its own way of communicating. Follow the famous directive “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” and your social media marketing efforts will be all the more successful.

Three: I Will Always Use an Image When I Post to Social Media

Content posted on social media should always include an image. People are easily distracted whenever they’re on social media, so visual stimuli are crucial to catch your audience’s attention. Social media platforms are cluttered. Your content will go down the drain absent a high-quality image on your post to catch their eye in the newsfeed.

Numerous studies have confirmed that visuals get the most engagement in social media. Make sure to use eye-popping images in all of your posts—even if your brand is not visual.

Four: I Will Always Tag the Author When Posting

Always tag authors and contributors to your content in your social media marketing postings. This practice gives your post authority, especially if the author or contributor are well-known entities in the industry. It also notifies the author about your post, increasing the chances that they will share the content with their own network.

This is especially important when you curate others’ content, as I mention in the sixth commandment below.

Five: I Will Repeatedly Post Content

You should repeatedly post content in social media to maximize exposure, especially content that gets a lot of engagement. Identify which of your content gets a lot of traction with your audience. This is a strong indicator that you have valuable content. Then follow through—repurpose it for your other social media channels, and even for new and upcoming campaigns.

With a ‘post once and you’re done’ attitude, you miss out on the 99 percent of social media users who probably never see a given social media posting on a given day. However, it should go without saying: only repeatedly post content that is evergreen and still relevant.

Six: I Will Become Better at Content Curation

If you curate and share content representing similar topics, you expand the community around your own topic. This also increases the chances that social media users engage with your content. It works especially well if you curate influencers’ content. If they then share your content it can spark the beginning of a relationship that you can leverage in the tenth commandment below.

Sending out 100 percent self-promotional content as social media marketing today simply doesn’t work. Even consumer brands aren’t creating content for some social channels like Instagram. Instead they’re leveraging user-generated content. Content is a commodity. Once you learn to leverage others’ content for your own social media program, it will positively impact your own content marketing in social.
If you want to better understand content curation, check out Curata’s awesome Definitive Guide to Content Curation.

Seven: I Will Leverage Paid Social for Strategic Content to Meet Objectives

Unfortunately, high quality content is not enough to turn your social media audience into customers. Like it or not, organic reach continues to diminish. Someday it will be all but declared dead. Marketers who want to be successful should now look at wholeheartedly investing in paid social.

One advantage of using paid social is the accompanying privilege of micro-targeting. This ensures you only pay for the most potentially lucrative audience seeing your content. Paid social ensures that your brand—and content—are seen by your target audience.

I don’t recommend boosting every social media post. But the most strategic posts, that have a direct ROI KPI attached to them—these are both the easiest to boost and worth the expense.

Eight: I Will Religiously Analyze and Optimize

Always look at your social analytics in addition to your content marketing metrics for hints of how to gain more traction for your social content. What to post more; what to post less, and where. This can save you a lot of resources and help increase clicks and reach.

Make sure you have the right social media tools in place to measure and provide insight into the suggested timing, frequency, and content for each social network.

Nine: I Will Create Content Based on Social Media Audience Needs

Use social media marketing as a way to create content. Always analyze which content is popular in your industry or subject category, and make sure you have content that speaks to that subject. Start by finding topics that are practically useful to your audience and to the industry as a whole. These topics are also typically most discussed in and around the industry on various social media channels.

Check how others approached such topics and the kind of content they produce. Using the information you obtained, create something unique that speaks to your audience’s specific needs.

Ten: I Will Create New Content FROM Social Media

Generate new content from your social media marketing by engaging with influencers, followers, and fans. Ask for their input on a subject you’re writing about. People in social media consume information that is relevant to them. So ask your audience about the topics for your next piece of strategic content. It’s a win-win!

Influencers are called influencers for a reason. They know what makes an audience tick. Identify the influencers in your industry, follow them, and start communicating with them. Influencers can provide you with secrets of the trade that can help you create your content.

Conclusion

The success of your content marketing will be in some way proportional to the effort you invest in social media marketing. It is true that every great social strategy starts with great content. But today, learning how to use social media is equally important. Especially if you are investing a lot of your time, money, and effort into creating content for marketing objectives.

The social media landscape is full of opportunities as long as you understand how to harness them. Use these Ten Commandments to help you make the most of your content’s potential in social media marketing. And given how integral curation is to your social media efforts, make sure to download the Curata eBook, Curate Content Like a Boss: The Hands on Guide to help smash your social goals out of the park.

Before we get deep into social media tactics, ensure you’re planning out your content—and social media updates—on an editorial content calendar. This ensures every piece of content is properly promoted in an organized manner. Download this free editorial calendar template to start planning today.

Now it’s time to take your social media promotion to the next level.

Here are 11 effective ways to promote your content using social media you probably aren’t doing enough of.

Embrace The Visual

We all know tweets with images get more engagement. We’ve known for a while that photos on Facebook get more engagement. Even images on LinkedIn get more engagement. Three of the “newest” social networks—Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat, are based entirely on images. So why aren’t you leveraging the visual when promoting your content? Don’t just create a branded “featured image” to share with your post. Create separate images for each of the main points in your content. Use these when you repeatedly post to social media (see below for more on this point). Check out my post on top social media for business quotes for an example that clearly illustrates how to leverage the visual.

Headlines Matter

You’re writing great content, but are you writing a title worthy of grabbing someone’s attention in social media? If not you either need to:

1. Create better titles that help your posts to be more promotable in social media or…
2. Create a new title specifically for sharing your content in social media.

Don’t just settle for one title. You should be posting your content multiple times. Create multiple titles, and perform A/B testing to see which headlines most effectively promote your content on which social networks. Use a tool like BuzzSumo to help you research effective titles for the same type of content per social network. (See Curata’s post about curated content for more tips about creating new titles.)

Customize For the Platform

When sharing content, utilize the customizable posting features on each social media platform. This includes the headline, image, and a description of the content you’re sharing. Every marketer and social media user is competing to catch the user’s eye. The more optimized your post is for a particular platform, the more effective your social media promotion will be.

For example, if you share a link to Facebook, you have the opportunity to create a post that truly stands out. All you need is an attention-grabbing headline, a clean, relevant image that piques interest (which might be different from the featured image), and a short, compelling description.

With this formula, you can entice readers to click on your content. In the same manner, appending your content with hashtags helps make it more discoverable for those social networks that support them. See this tweet by former Curata CMO Michael Gerard for an example of using hashtags and an image:

How to fight halitosis with event swag and tchotchkes http://t.co/9Z5uK8rahg #Halloween and event #Marketing pic.twitter.com/AxFPXLre6q

— Michael Gerard (@michaelgerard) October 31, 2014

Share at the Right Time

Though this tip may seem like common sense, many content marketers overlook this simple concept. For maximum engagement, the content you’re sharing needs to reach as many people as possible. So you have to go where the crowd is—and when they are online and active. Then you can compile a posting schedule to ensure you post during a certain time of day.

Keep in mind that different social media platforms may not have the same peak times. While there are many infographics telling you the best time to post in social media, some of it simply comes down to understanding how users engage on each social network, and experimenting. Some social media platforms have features designed to aid you in this process, such as Facebook Insights. In addition, third party tools such as FollowerWonk help estimate the best times for some platforms.

Don’t be Afraid to Post Multiple Times

Numerous data studies suggest you will be more effective by promoting the same content multiple times on social media. Use multiple images and multiple headlines for your content. This way you engage with your followers without them even knowing you’re reposting the same content. Social media users don’t see most of your posts on any given day anyway. So posting multiple times ensures your audience has a chance to see your content.

Ask Questions

Don’t just drop links. Drive social media users to communicate with you—and increase the chances they engage with your content—by asking for questions and feedback. Social media was made for people; not for businesses. So you should always be striving to create a human connection with social media users.

The beauty of social media marketing is that it can improve both your public relations and content marketing, simply by asking for a response. To generate feedback and promote engagement on social media, include a question with your content that compels readers to respond. Better yet, create questions for some of your headlines and test the waters. Questions are a great attention grabber, and help foster a community of connection that results in more effective social media promotion.

Share on the right platform

With so many social media sites constantly sprouting up and vying for attention, it can be hard to keep up. Just when we thought we knew everything with the emergence of Ello, now comes Tsu. Having accounts on various sites can be advantageous for fostering innovation and staying creative. But it can also be difficult to choose which platform to post your content to.

To reiterate, since different sites serve different purposes and audiences, it’s crucial to familiarize yourself with the major social media platforms your target audience uses. Avoid redundancy and simply “dumping” content across all channels. Concentrate on the platforms where you have the highest chance to engage with your audience. Use this list of content promotion tools to see which platform best fits your needs.

Once your social media promotion is successful on these platforms, use that information to start embarking on a new platform. Don’t forget to share your multimedia content to social networks like Slideshare, iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher and, of course, YouTube.

Pay to Play

Why pay for Likes or Follows when you can promote your content to a micro-targeted audience in social media? Paid Social is mainstream, meaning you can pay to promote your content into the news feeds of social media users, where you are guaranteed visibility from a relevant audience. If you haven’t done so already, try shifting your budget to experiment, whether on Twitter, Facebook, or another network.

Maximize Your Brand Advocates

Does your company have an employee advocacy program? Employees or partners are likely already sharing your content socially. Get more of them to do so more regularly to help promote your content. There are many tools that make it easy to manage and measure social media sharing by brand advocates. See the aforementioned list of content promotion tools for a full breakdown of different advocacy tools, such as GaggleAMP and SocialChorus.

Leverage Communities

An employee advocacy program is one way of leveraging communities. It allows you to utilize the strength in numbers approach to promote your content to more social media users. However, you first have to have a community in order to do so. There are already more than two million communities within LinkedIn alone. Not to mention additional communities in the form of Twitter chats, Google Plus communities, shared Pinterest boards, and even Facebook Groups.

Joining and becoming an engaging member of relevant communities allows you to promote your content to a very targeted audience of social media users. Such groups could be in the hundreds, thousands, or even more—the largest LinkedIn Group has more than one million members! (There’s even a community for content marketing and promotion: The Content Marketing Forum.)

Experiment With Content Creator Communities

I saved this for last because it is not everyone’s cup of tea, but there are a number of other communities such as Triberr, Social Buzz Club, and Viral Content Buzz. They exist outside of social media for the sole purpose of bringing together content creators and enhancing your social media promotion. If the content you discover on one of these sites is something you would considering curating, then this might be a good site to consider promoting your own content on.

What’s Next

When it comes to promoting content, social media is one of the most powerful tools available; however, most content marketers fail to truly maximize its potential. Utilize one or all of these 11 ways to promote your social media content, and you’ll generate significantly more traffic for your precious content.

Which of these 11 methods have worked for you? Any others that you would add to the list? Please chime in below in the comments!

For more information about promoting blog content, download Curata’s eBook, Business Blogging Secrets Revealed.