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Your content is perfect! Or so you feel. You have been implementing new techniques and have been applying aspects of storytelling in your content in order to increase the rate of engagement. Unfortunately, unless you are effective at content distribution all your effort will have been for nothing.
This is a problem that businesses even the ones with the greatest writers face. In order to get more people reading your content, you need to learn how to widely distribute your content so that you can broaden your reach.
In case you are only using one distribution channel, you need to take advantage of the numerous opportunities that are available by investing in more distribution channels.
Having A Presence on Multiple Channels
If you only add content to your channels only once a month, that is not going to cut it. One of the first steps you need to take is to ensure that you have an active presence on all of your distribution channels.
First, think of how many social media profile’s you have set up. If you have few or none set up, you should give priority to setting up a social media profile. Depending on your business model, that is, B2B or B2C or both, you might want to give emphasis to some social media channels but generally you should have the following, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram.
I’m also assuming that you have an email list. If not, this is definitely something you cannot afford to overlook anymore. If you already have an email list, how often do you send out emails?
Users who follow you on social media or who subscribe to your newsletters do so because they want to hear from you. You do them a great injustice when you do not send them any information. However, you need to establish a perfect balance, otherwise if you ‘communicate’ with them too frequently you might come across as annoying.
According to figures released by QuickSprout, almost 58% of social media users unfollow brands because they feel that they are drowning in the brand’s promotions.
So, as much as you should post your content daily, try not to exhaust your followers by flooding their timelines.
Understanding Your Audience
Content consumption varies depending on your audience. It is imperative that you conduct research on your target audience and get an in-depth understanding.
Once you know who your target audience is it will be much easier to deduce from what channels they consume their content.
Once you identify those channels, then use the predominant formats to reach out to your target audience.
For instance, if your brand mainly creates blog posts and you want to reach out to your audience on Instagram, you cannot use blog posts on Instagram. Instead, you will need a paradigm shift as far as your content creation goes since images and videos are the predominant form of content on Instagram.
Since you are trying to promote your content on multiple channels, you will need to create multiple formats of the same content or otherwise, that will resonate with the target audience found on those platforms.
Proper Timing
Say you are promoting a single piece of content on all channels you have a presence on. It would not be wise to promote the said piece of content on multiple channels at once. This is because there might be overlap in audiences from one platform to the next.
You need to take a ‘drip approach’, that is, you should publish a link on Facebook one day, and publish a quote with a link back to the content on Twitter the following day. On the third day or a couple of days later, you could use a story to promote your content on Instagram.
If overlapping audiences notice that you are bombarding them with the same piece of content, they might unfollow you.
Another aspect of timing, is the time of day you should post your content on social media. Different social media channels have optimum times when your content is most likely visible to your target audience.
Try and schedule your content out as follows:
| Social Media Channel | Best Time To Post |
| 12 – 2 PM | |
| 12 – 3 PM | |
| 4 – 5 PM | |
| 7 – 10 PM | |
| 7 – 9 AM | |
| Google + | 8 – 10 AM |
Relevant Content
Ensure that the content you post on your timeline is relevant to your target audience. Every now and then, you might feel an urge to share some piece of breaking news, and there is really nothing wrong with that.
But this does not mean that you should share every news story you come across. Also, when promoting an offer that expires soon, such as a flash sale, you won’t have to follow the publishing schedule followed above as the offer is time sensitive.
Using Automation Tools
Since you are trying to distribute your content across multiple channels, this can be very exhausting which is why I and many others recommend the use of automation tools. Automation tools will help keep all of your social media channels updated all in the click of a button.
In fact, automated tools such as HootSuite make it possible to schedule your posts on social media channels where you have a presence.
This will save you as a marketer tons of time that can be used to engage in other productive activities.
Repurposing Old Content
This is based on the principle of working smarter and not harder.
Assuming that you have a gifted team of writers, you might have already published content that was chockfull of data back when you did not understand the importance of distributing your content. This is now the time to get that content in front of readers.
In such a case, you have a couple of options:
- Write a new article with a different title and make reference to your old article
- Republish the old post with updated data
Once you have done either one of these, you can then go ahead and distribute your content using the techniques mentioned above.
Make Your Content Shareable
You probably have noticed this, but more and more publishers are making their content shareable by adding social media sharing buttons within the content.
This is because it works and if you are not doing it already, now is the time.
By sharing your content readers are also endorsing it which makes it more trustworthy to new readers who might not be familiar with your brand.
Some of the social media buttons you should add to your blog posts include, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Slack, Email etc
Adding social media share buttons on your blog post makes it easier for your readers to share your content. If this had not been an alternative your readers would be forced to copy the link to your content every single time they wanted to share the content.
Which is kind of exhausting, especially when you consider that they are helping amplify your content and brand at zero cost.
If you would like to know more about how you can get more audience tuned into the content you create, reach out to us.