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.

What is Content Marketing?

First, the basics… I love this definition from Amanda Maksymiw of Fuze, who says content marketing can be defined as:

The process of developing and sharing relevant, valuable, and engaging content to target [an] audience with the goal of acquiring new customers or increasing business from existing customers.

See that? Developing and sharing. Content marketing isn’t just about what’s created. Content marketing is about the entire process, including the way you distribute and promote that content. Social media marketing is content marketing. It’s made of the same things: pictures, video, copy, strategy, and storytelling. The differences are the formats of content and the platforms.

The Connecting Elements Running Through Content and Social

There are four elements that apply to both content marketing and social media marketing. To succeed in your content and social media marketing strategy, you must address them in both. The four elements are:

1. Objectives
2. Buyers’ personas
3. Product (this includes priority, messaging and value propositions)
4. Editorial plan

This post addresses all four elements, and how to create a plan around them that scales for both content and social.

Aligning Objectives

Content and social have similar functions in your overall marketing strategy. Your content and social should serve one or some of these objectives:

• Help your audience understand the subject matter you specialize in
• Challenge the status quo on your subject
• Entertain your audience with content specific to them
• Educate your audience on new best practices and trends
• Convince your audience to buy your product

Your content and social shouldn’t just align with each other, they should also align with your overall business objectives. Some business objectives that your content marketing and social media can assist with include:

• Build brand equity
• Create and retain customers
• Enable sales

To turn your business goals into social media goals, I recommend first converting those goals into the marketing equivalent, then the content marketing equivalent, and finally into social media marketing. This prevents you from making big leaps from business to social media goals. It also helps illustrate the connectedness between your content and social media goals.

Translating Business Objectives to Content and Social Objectives

The business objective example:
Increase x percent of product revenue by expanding to a new segment.

The corresponding marketing objective:
Establish the product as the preferred choice for the audience that fits in the new segment by building awareness and driving demand.

The corresponding content marketing objective:
Build awareness and drive demand for the product as the preferred choice for the audience that fits in the new segment by creating and promoting relevant content to relevant channels.

The corresponding social media equivalent:
Build awareness and drive demand for the product as the as the preferred choice of the audience that fits in the new segment by creating and promoting content to relevant social media channels.

This objective is by no means a strategy. The goal is to align all departments from the business level all the way to social media. To execute this objective, or any objective in the content and social arena, first determine who your audience is and where to find them.

Who is Your Audience and Where Are They?

The first step for a content marketing or social media marketer in defining an audience is developing a buyer persona. According to HubSpot:

Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers. They are based on real data about customer demographics and online behavior, along with educated speculation about their personal histories, motivations, and concerns.

The benefits of developing buyer personas include:

• Identify with your audience
• Rally the internal and external teams
• Share a common understanding
• Drive messaging development
• Guide content creation

Here’s an example of a buyer persona by Elizabeth Gelom that might be useful to a content marketer:

Lois Lane

Demographics:

Age: 32
Occupation: Journalist/Media/Crime Reporter
Work: The Washington Post/The Marshall Project
Family: Single
Location: Washington, D.C. (travels a lot)
Archetype: The Inquisitive
Characteristics: Organized, curious, methodical, interested
Quote: “We don’t go into journalism to be popular. It is our job to seek the truth and put constant pressure on our leaders until we get answers.”

About Lois:

Lois has always wanted to be a reporter ever since she was a little girl, and started her career by becoming the editor of her high school newspaper. She went on to write for her local newspaper before going to college and then becoming a reporter for the Washington Post.

In her role as the crime reporter for The Washington Post and a freelance journalist for The Marshall Project, Lois uses Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) data to help support her stories. She works with analysts at Pew Research for fact checking, and often talks to local law enforcement and politicians for her stories as well.

In her free time, Lois spends time with her boyfriend who is also a journalist at The Daily Planet and a world renowned crime fighter. Lois received her undergrad degree in journalism from Columbia University in New York. She then spent three years as an intern at the New York Times before moving to Washington, D.C. to work for The Washington Post.

Her Goals:

• Break the next big story.
• Win a Pulitzer.
• To read and understand the data from xxx to help write stories that are accurate and enthralling.

Her Challenges:

• Roadblocks placed by subject matter experts, politicians, and the Department of Justice.
• Embargoed reports.
• Out of date data.
• Unreadable and hard to understand data.

Once you’ve developed an effective buyer persona, you need to create a version specifically for social media. To do this, add in additional information about where your persona exists online, which content topics they might be interested in, and the social platforms they frequent. Here’s what I’d add into the Lois Lane persona in her description:

Add the Following to “About Lois”

She wants to know about _________________________. She is always searching for _______________________.

Lois uses keyword search extensively and subscribes to numerous RSS feeds. She is on Twitter 24/7 and wants to know what’s trending and what’s happening. Her mobile phone is her BFF. Getting reliable data sources is supercritical for Lois.

Content Topics

Future Trends of ________
Challenges of implementing ________
Tips and tricks for ________
Review of __________
The impact of ________ on ____________
_________white paper

Social Media Channels (Mobile Friendly Format)

• Twitter
• RSS
• LinkedIn
• Keyword search and hashtags

These extra details help your social media person understand what your content person might be creating. They also give them a better idea of what platforms to focus on, how to segment their promotions, and the voice to use in their messaging.

After developing clear, well-aligned buyer personas, look at your product and determine how it fits with your persona. Ask yourself what you can do with your content and on social to make sure your proposition and messaging line up.

Value Proposition and Messaging

Focus on messaging and value propositions that help your target audience drive your business goals. You should develop a value proposition for the following areas:

• Product-specific
• Event-specific
• Discount-specific
• Editorial-topic specific
• Solution specific

Understand how your buyer persona will benefit, and what the most compelling messaging for them is depending on their persona. It could be one of, or a mix of the following:

• Monetary
• Emotional
• Productivity
• Rational

There are other benefits, but the ones listed above are the most common. Take your determinations on the benefits most important to your buyer and answer the following questions to develop your value proposition:

• Product-specific: what benefits will the reader receive if they use _______________?
• Event-specific: why do they need to attend ________?
• Discount-specific: Save ______ and be ________.
• Editorial-topic specific: They want to learn or be educated about __________ so they can ____________, _______, _________
• Solution specific: Help them solve _________ so they can ______________, _________, _________

As with all the other steps we’re taking, once you answer these questions you can create an aligned social media messaging strategy. Next, use your value proposition and messaging to develop an editorial strategy for both social and content at the same time.

Editorial Strategy

Brainstorm content topics that align with the messaging you’ve just developed. We recommend mapping the content you plan on creating through to stages of the buyer’s journey. Here’s an example for a boutique hotel in the U.K.:

There are several other places your content topic ideas can come from:

• Branding guide
• Persona (challenges, pain points, goals)
• Products and services
• Customer journeys
• Customer questions from social media channels

You should create a social editorial calendar at the same time as your content calendar. Just make sure you break your social media calendar into strategic and tactical actions.

Content scheduled in the next week should have tactical social messaging attached directly to it. Content scheduled months in advance needs only to have a strategy attached until you’re closer to publish date.

Once you’ve developed a base for keeping your social and content strategies optimized for one another, maintain it regularly to keep both strategies in alignment.

Collaborate, Collaborate, and Collaborate

Schedule out regular meetings between your social and content team to ensure everyone’s on the same page. You should hone in on the topics addressed in this blog post during each meeting. Cover objectives, personas, messaging and the editorial calendar in each meeting.

Successfully Integrating Content and Social Media Marketing

It takes effort to fully align your content marketing with your social media marketing. But once you’ve got your objectives, buyers’ personas, product, and editorial plan nailed down, it gets a lot easier. Need help getting started on your editorial calendar? Download Curata’s free Content Marketing Editorial Calendar Template.

Changes to Google search results pages have further obscured content organically, especially on competitive commercial searches. Meanwhile, paid search costs per click (CPCs) are at all-time highs in established markets.

Organic reach in social media? It’s pretty much dead. Half of all content gets zero shares, and less than 0.1 percent is shared more than 1,000 times.

Additionally, the typical internet marketing conversion rate is less than one percent.

How Content Marketing Doesn’t (Usually) Work

How does content marketing actually work? Many people’s content marketing strategy basically consists of a three-step process:

1. Create new content.
2. Share your content on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).
3. People buy your stuff.

Nope. This almost never happens. (For a content marketing strategy that actually works, try a documented plan such as the Content Marketing Pyramid.)

Most content goes nowhere. The consumer purchase journey isn’t a straight line—and it takes time.

So is there a more reliable way to increase leads and sales with content?

Social Media Advertising To The Rescue!

Now it’s time for the good news! Social media advertising provides the most scalable content promotion and is proven to turn visitors into leads and customers.

And the best part? You don’t need a huge ad budget.

A better, more realistic process for content marketing with promotion looks like this:

1. Create: Produce content and share it on social media.
2. Amplify: Selectively promote your top content on social media.
3. Tag: Build your remarketing audience by tagging site visitors with a cookie.
4. Filter: Apply behavioral and demographic filters on your audience.
5. Remarketing: Remarket to your audience with display ads, social ads, and Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) to promote offers.
6. Convert: Capture qualified leads or sale.
7. Repeat.

Promotion is sorely overlooked from many content marketers’ priority list—it’s actually the lowest priority according to a recent study of 1000+ marketers. For marketers who take promotion more seriously, The Ultimate List of Content Promotion Tools is a godsend.

You can use the following ten Twitter and Facebook advertising hacks as a catalyst to get more eyeballs on your content, or as an accelerant to create an even larger traffic explosion.

1. Improve Your Quality Score

Quality Score is the metric Google uses to rate the quality and relevance of your keywords and PPC ads, and influences your cost-per-click. Facebook calls their version a “Relevancy Score”:

While Twitter’s is called a “Quality Adjusted Bid”:

Whatever it’s called, Quality Score is a crucial metric. The way to increase Twitter and Facebook Quality Scores is to increase post engagement rates.

A high Quality Score is great: you get a higher ad impression share for the same budget at a lower cost per engagement. On the flip side, a low Quality Score sucks: you get a low ad impression share and a high cost per engagement.

How do you increase engagement rates? Promote your best content—your unicorns (the top 1-3 percent of content that performs better than everything else) rather than your donkeys (the bottom 97 percent of your content).

To figure out if your content is a unicorn or donkey, test it out.

• Post lots of stuff (organically) to Twitter and use Twitter Analytics to see which content gets the most engagement.
• Post your top stuff from Twitter organically to LinkedIn and Facebook. Again, track which posts get the most traction.
• Pay to promote the unicorns on Facebook and Twitter.

The key to paid social media advertising is to be picky. Cast a narrow net and maximize those engagement rates.

2. Increase Engagement With Audience Targeting

Targeting all your fans isn’t precise; it’s lazy and wastes a lot of money.

Your fans aren’t a homogenous blob. They all have different incomes, interests, values, and preferences.

For example, by targeting fans of Donald Trump, people with social media marketing job titles, NRA members, and the hashtag #NeverHillary (and excluding Democrats, fans of Hillary Clinton, and the hashtag #neverTrump), this tweet for an Inc. article I wrote got ten times higher engagement:

Keyword targeting and other audience targeting methods helps turn average ads into unicorns.

3. Generate Free Clicks From Paid Social Media Advertising

On Twitter, tweet engagements are the most popular type of ad campaign. Why? I have no idea. You have to pay for every user engagement (whether someone views your profile, expands your image, expands your tweet from the tweet stream, or clicks on a hashtag).

If you’re doing this, you need to stop—now. It’s a giant waste of money and offers the worst ROI.

Instead, pay only for the thing that matters most to your business, whether it’s clicks to your website, app installs, followers, leads, or actual video views.

For example, when you run a Twitter followers campaign, you pay only when someone follows you. But your tweet promoting one of your unicorn pieces of content will also get a ton of impressions, retweets, replies, mentions, likes, and visits to your website. All for the low, low cost of $0.

4. Promote Unicorn Video Ads!

Would you believe you can get thousands of video views at a cost of just $0.02 per view?

Shoppers who view videos are more likely to remember you, and buy from you. Quick tips for success:

• Promote videos that have performed the best (i.e., driven the most engagement) on your website, YouTube, or elsewhere.
• Make sure people can understand your video without hearing it— an amazing 85 percent of Facebook videos are watched without sound, according to Digiday.
• Make it memorable, try to keep it short, and target the right audience.

Bonus: video ad campaigns increase relevancy score by two points!

5. Score Huge Wins With Custom Audiences

True story: a while back I wrote an article asking: Do Twitter Ads Work? To promote the article on Twitter, I used their tailored audiences feature to target key influencers.

The very same day, Business Insider asked for permission to publish the story. So I promoted that version of the article to influencers using tailored audiences.

An hour later, a Fox News producer emailed me. Look where I found myself:

The awesome power of custom audiences resulted in additional live interviews with major news outlets including the BBC; 250 high-value press pickups and links, massive brand exposure, 100,000 visits to the WordStream site, and a new business relationship with Facebook.

This is just one example of identity-based marketing using social media advertising. Whether it’s Twitter’s tailored audiences or Facebook’s custom audiences, this opens a ton of new and exciting advertising use cases!

6. Promote Your Content On More Social Platforms

Medium, Hacker News, Reddit, Digg, and LinkedIn Pulse all send you massive amounts of traffic. It’s important to post content to each that’s appropriate to the audience.

Post content on Medium or LinkedIn. New content is fine, but repurposing existing content is a better strategy because it gives a whole new audience the chance to discover and consume your existing content.

Again, use social media advertising as either a catalyst or an accelerant to get hundreds, thousands, or even millions of views you otherwise wouldn’t have. It might even open you up to syndication opportunities—I’ve had posts syndicated to New York Observer and Time Magazine.

You can also promote existing content on sites like Hacker News, Reddit, or Digg. Getting upvotes can create valuable exposure that sends tons of traffic to your existing content.

For a minimal investment, you can get serious exposure and traffic!

7. Hacking RankBrain for Insanely Awesome SEO

Google is using an AI machine learning system called RankBrain to understand and interpret long-tail queries, especially on queries Google has never seen before—an estimated 15 percent of all queries.

I believe Google is examining user engagement metrics (such as click-through rates, bounce rates, dwell time, and conversion rates) as a way—in part, to rank pages that have earned very few or no links.

Even if user engagement metrics aren’t part of the core ranking algorithm, getting really high organic CTRs and conversion rates has its own great rewards:

• More clicks and conversions.
• Better organic search rankings.
• Even more clicks and conversions.

For example, research found a 19 percent lift in paid search conversion volume and a 10 percent improvement in cost per action (CPA) with exposure to Facebook ads for the financial services company Experian.

Use social media advertising to build brand recognition and double your organic search clickthrough and conversion rates!

8. Social Media Remarketing

Social media remarketing, on average, boosts engagement by three times and doubles conversion rates, while cutting your costs by a third. Make the most of it!

Use social media remarketing to push your hard offers, such as sign-ups, consultations, and downloads.

9. Combine Everything With Super Remarketing

Super remarketing is the awesome combination of remarketing, demographics, behaviors, and high engagement content. Here’s how and why it works.

• Behavior and interest targeting: These are the people interested in your stuff.
• Remarketing: These are the people who have recently checked out your stuff.
• Demographic targeting: These are the people who can afford to buy your stuff.

If you target paid social media advertising to a narrow audience that meets all three criteria using your high engagement unicorns—the result?

10. Combine Paid Search & Social Media Advertising

For our final, and most advanced hack of them all, we combine social media advertising with PPC search ads on Google using Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA).

RLSA is incredibly powerful. You can target customized search ads specifically to people who have recently visited your site when they search on Google. It increases click-through and conversion rates by three times and reduces cost-per-click by a third.

There’s one problem. By definition, RLSA doesn’t target people who are unfamiliar with your brand. This is where social media advertising comes in: it helps more people become familiar with your brand.

Social media advertising is a cheap way to start the process of biasing people towards you. While they may not need what you’re selling now, later, when the need arises, people are much more likely to do a branded search for your stuff, or click on you during an unbranded search because they remember your compelling content.

If your content marketing efforts are struggling, these ridiculously powerful Twitter and Facebook advertising hacks will turn your content donkeys into unicorns! Looking for another awesome hack to supercharge your content ROI? Social curation enables more consistent content publication, supports your created content strategy, and helps you keep track of your favorite information. Download The Ultimate Guide to Content Curation eBook below.

Here are ten great Tweets on content from Dreamforce. To see more conversations about the conference search #DF13

1. @hartlecp “Without an audience, your content is just a tree falling in the woods that no one hears.” – @jkrohrs #df13 #df13marketing #contentmarketing Click to Tweet

2. @DG_Report Misconception about content is that the promo effort ends once it’s posted http://dg-r.co/I51RiF  @stein_nick #DF13 Click to Tweet

3. @Vocus “We try to be too clever, creating content and stories for the media rather than the media’s audience.” – @cspenn #DF13 Click to Tweet

4. @Eloqua #df13 Every company is a customer company. Never forget that behind every device and every tweet is a customer. – @benioff  Click to Tweet

5. @ValaAfshar Converged content (paid, owned, earned) must map to sales funnel and be delivered across multi channel. #DF13 #CMO Click to Tweet

6. @AmyHatDell Content in king. If you are only measuring $ spent you are missing more than half the story. #DF13 Click to Tweet

7. @kyleplacy Integrated experiences are about being seamless with both content and technology #df13 @scottdorsey Click to Tweet

8. @katieburkie @mvolpe at #DF13 “create remarkable content: be the most-read publication for your industry and think like a media company.” Click to Tweet

9. ‏@danielwje “Content is what brings all digital marketing interactions together.” @smccorkle #df13” Click to Tweet

10. @GoToMeeting “The only sustainable content strategy is to think of core human things that inspire people to share,” says @peretti #DF13 Click to Tweet

See any other great content marketing Tweets from Dreamforce?  Keep the conversation going! Tweet us @GetCurata