Social media is fun, and so is picking the site on which you want to display your content!

Social media is fun, and so is picking the site on which you want to display your content!

It is hard to understand the impact of social media, especially if you’re still developing a strategy, and made even more difficult if you aren’t already an avid tweeter, poster or blogger.

But in today’s ecommerce market, it is an essential part of engaging your audience and getting people to read your content. What good is content if you have no way of promoting it?

If you are diving into content marketing, be sure to integrate social media. If you include it in your plans from the beginning, it is easy to create a seamless, cross-platform strategy for your content.

Which Social Site to Use

A great, simple breakdown of social media. Click to head to a blog post about how this chart was created.

A great, simple breakdown of social media. Click to head to a blog post about how this chart was created.

This largely depends on your customer base. In our last post, we talked about how reviewing the most talked-about topics of 2014 can help you decide where to post your content. This is true all year round; find out what people are talking about and how they are talking about it. Take time to learn about the different personalities of each social media channel.

Mediabistro and Entrepreneur.com have great, comprehensive guides to figuring out which social media channel will be most beneficial for your endeavor. Once you decide where you want to post, you have to figure out what you want to post. (Hint: that’s where Content Runner’s high-quality content Writers come in handy).

Don’t just pick a site because you think it is the most popular, and remember that you can also pick one or two sites to start with and expand after you become more successful on those platforms. Think of your audience, what best fits the type of content you are promoting, and only filter “which one you like best” toward the very end of the selection process.

Creating a Content Strategy

There’s a lot that goes into deciding what you want in your content. Across social media, you have to think about character limits, if including an image will increase traffic and much more. But before you dive into the nitty-gritty, you need engaging, informative content that communicates your brand.

To get this, find a writer who has expertise in your specific field and communicate instructions clearly. Including as much detail as possible is great, but if you trust a writer enough to let them work a little bit creatively, they might come up with something you never would’ve thought of. But remember—you can’t communicate your brand or what you what to be known for if you don’t identify those first.

Plan, Plan and Plan Some More

As I’ve reiterated throughout this post, researching, planning and immersing yourself in social media is the quickest way to learn what will work best for your needs. If you don’t have the cash to shell out for a social media expert, reach out to a friend you know is social-media saavy and have them help you come up with instructions for writers.

There are lots of ways to do social media—some wrong, some weird and some awesome—but the worst thing is to just not do social media at all. Get a writer to help you with tweets and Facebook posts, test to see where your audience is most active and embrace the various platforms. Social media isn’t a fad, and it is becoming inherently linked to content marketing, so don’t miss the bus and get left in the rain with great content and no way to showcase it.