Marketing Content with Social Media: Tweet This!

Welcome back!  Today marks our fifth and final post on leveraging content development opportunities – and hark! The choir of angels sings Twitter. It’s far from breaking news that social media is a content marketing force that’s only growing in its impact and reach, and while it won’t replace a conventional blog, Twitter is a fantastic way to build relationships, meet new people, and drive traffic back to your site.  So let’s talk about leveraging Twitter as a content marketing strategy (that you can’t afford to ignore)!

If you haven’t already explored Twitter, do it now.  It’s an incredibly simple social-sharing platform with decidedly powerful, real-time SEO content marketing mojo.

Twitter Pros & Cons

Twitter Pros:

• Twitter is a ripe medium for showcasing your expertise, answering questions of potential partners and prospects, generating leads, and networking with those in your industry.

• Twitter allows you real-time announcements of new blog posts, articles, and other content that link back to your site.

• Retweets of your blog posts and content can exponentially – as in three times or more — drive traffic to your site.

Twitter Cons:

Like writing blogs, Twitter takes time, work, commitment, and planning.  And, like blogs, it’s not about blasting your sales message.  It’s about building relationships.

• Be prepared to build a Twitter editorial calendar, and to rein in any overly promotional tweets.  Sales-y tweets are a sure way to lose followers.  Consistency and conversation are the watchwords.

• Be aware that not everyone will see your tweets – or retweet your posts — all the time.

• Know when not to tweet:  If you haven’t the time or resources to cultivate your Twitter presence with any consistency, then it’s probably not the medium for you.

How to Structure Your Tweets

Although it’s wise to first commit to a content marketing strategy and editorial calendar, don’t be shy to simply “try out” Twitter:  check out what others are chirping about and float out a few tweets of your own!

• Think conversational:  offer a well-balanced diet of quality information, insights, and observations, as well as the occasional sales message. You will be rewarded with followers, mentions, and retweets.

• Remember to keep it short and sweet:  you are limited to 140 characters (including spaces) to relay your message.  To encourage re-tweets, it’s in your best interest to tighten your message even further, say to 130 characters, minus your user name.  That way, most of your message will stay intact when re-tweeted.

• Pay attention to your @mentions:  those great people replying to or mentioning you in their tweets.  In the interest of cultivating relationships, be sure to tweet them back.

• Use hashtags (#):  to identify your topic so that folks can find your specific tweets more easily.  For instance, if you were tweeting your new blog post about SEO, you would want to use the hashtag #SEO after your tweet.

That’s a wrap for the leveraging content development opportunities.  Thanks for checking in!  Next week, we’ll discuss how to measure our content marketing success….and as always, we’ll keep it simple!  See you then!