• Your social media networks play an important role in improving SEO and thought leadership development. They can also help you with prospect acquisition and customer nurturing.

Content marketing programs are intended to drive new customers to your site and maintain relationships with existing customers. They also establish your company’s authority as a thought leader. If you implement a content marketing program without any supporting social media network, it will negatively impact your program’s scalability and overall results.

Which platform should I use for my business?

There are many types of social media networks for different types of businesses. For most B2B companies, we have seen customers have success using Twitter to make announcements and to share snippets of their blog posts. They also use LinkedIn for customer acquisition and thought leadership, using deeply informative articles or position pieces.

For some companies that deal with small businesses, Facebook may be appropriate. However, for most B2B companies, Twitter and LinkedIn have garnered the best results for the money spent.

How important is the role of social media in my marketing program?

Social media distributes and amplifies your content. Without those distribution channels, your blog’s exposure is limited.

Social media does a couple of things that can truly benefit content marketing programs:

• Amplify and distribute snippets of your content with links back to your website.
• Improve SEO results.

Social media can improve SEO because it generates positive algorithmic signals indicating that you are sharing valuable content. Therefore, it should rank higher within the search results. Examples of algorithmic signals would be likes, shares, retweets, etc.

How can I measure success with social media?

There a couple of metrics that can be used to gauge results. Here are simple steps you can follow:

Establish a baseline

You must establish a baseline of how many people are following you on social networks. You also need to determine what your current level of engagement is. Baseline metrics include:

• Retweets
• Likes
• Shares

Determine program success using the baseline

Once you establish the baseline, you need to know the number of website visitors who came from your social media networks. You can now start to determine how well your program is doing. The success would be based on the delta between your baseline and where you’re at after a defined period (for example, monthly or every 3 months).

Using experts

If you’re not seeing strong traction with your social media efforts, you may want to look at hiring experts in this area, such as Tempesta Media.
Our software solution has capabilities that ensure excellent curated and original social posts that can be published to your social networks. We can also track the resulting impact on your company.

In summary

You need to have social media accounts as part of a content marketing program. Without them, you’re losing a valuable channel for amplification of your content. More importantly, you’re losing the opportunity to help influence your SEO rankings.

Need help?

If you have a content marketing program or are planning one, download our ebook 100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs.

This ebook will walk you through the mistakes of hundreds of other companies and the challenges they faced in implementing their content marketing programs. To learn more about how Tempesta Media can help you streamline your content creation process and deliver quality content at scale, contact us today.