Writing blog posts and social media marketing both take quite a bit of time, creativity, effort and cleverness to execute properly. However, they each serve a different purpose and help you achieve different goals.
When writing blog posts, your main goal is to inform or educate your readers. When creating social media posts, although the aforementioned goals are still applicable, your main goal is to engage your audience.
While your blog and your social accounts shouldn’t be twins (as we don’t want our marketing strategy to be a copy-paste job), they should absolutely still be siblings. You want to present the same topics you feel are important, but you want to do it in a way that is different and makes sense for the platform you’re using.
Keep reading to discover all the reasons behind why merging your blog posts and social media is a good idea, and how you can make it work for your business.
In your pool of customers, followers and fans, you always have those who prefer reading long-form content over looking at a picture or a quick status update – and vice versa.
Aligning your content marketing strategy between your blog posts and your social media content allows you to get the message across to both sides of the spectrum.
This means that you can create a visual that’s eye-catching on the feed and distill your point into an Instagram caption that’s shareable and likable, but you can also break down the topic further in a 1500-word blog post on your website for those members of your audience who love to get down into details.
If you don’t have an established website audience or have just started your website, you have a long road of SEO optimization and content creation ahead of you before you start seeing consistent organic traffic from search engines.
The way to initially kick off your website traffic is through PPC and referral marketing, and social is a great channel for the latter.
Unlike SEO where you wait for your content to be indexed and recognized, you can instantly grow your social channels for free through a killer hashtag strategy and community management.
Once you have an audience on social media channels, link back to your website in your social media post copy. Remember to also add your website root domain on channels like LinkedIn and Facebook that have a designated section for your business website. On Instagram, where you can’t directly paste clickable links in your post captions, you can utilize third-party tools to link multiple pieces of your website content in your bio.
The advice above is also applicable to traffic to social media from websites. If you’re a long-standing brand that’s just jumping on the social media bandwagon, having CTAs to connect on social scattered around your website will make it easier for your audience to find you on all platforms.
Perhaps you shared a blog post last year that connects to a topic that’s trending here and now, and you have a much larger audience on your socials today than you did when you first published the piece.
You don’t have to repeat yourself like a parrot, simply put the spotlight back onto your existing well-written content by resharing it on social media.
Reviving your old content won’t just make it more visible to your social media audience, it may actually help it rank better. Search ranking factors include not only using the right keywords and images, but how the content performs in terms of user behavior (traffic acquisition, sessions, views, time spent on a page, etc.).
If you have a few landing pages on your website that constantly drive organic traffic, then you’re set for quite some time and you can allow yourself to have a blogging break. The same, however, doesn’t apply to social media.
Social media is based on reach and impressions that are mostly driven by a consistent posting cadence. The second you take a longer break, you need to start all over again.
In the beginning, we said you don’t want your marketing to be a copy-paste job; and you don’t. Well, most of the time – each “rule” has its exceptions. In this case, repurposing content when you’re on the brink of burnout is one of those exceptions.
There are a variety of different social media tools out there that allow you to plan, schedule and analyze your content all in one place. Revisiting your old blog posts to pull quotes and images, then have them automatically post when you’re away is a good strategy to ensure you still retain a regular posting cadence and brand consistency.
Doing this once or twice a week on a regular basis is also acceptable, which can ensure your accounts get enough traction to keep going without needing to reinvent the wheel every day. Just make sure you still put up new and refreshing content equally as often.
If you need help developing a content strategy for your brand or business, then reach out to us here.
Getting your message across
In your pool of customers, followers and fans, you always have those who prefer reading long-form content over looking at a picture or a quick status update – and vice versa.
Aligning your content marketing strategy between your blog posts and your social media content allows you to get the message across to both sides of the spectrum.
This means that you can create a visual that’s eye-catching on the feed and distill your point into an Instagram caption that’s shareable and likable, but you can also break down the topic further in a 1500-word blog post on your website for those members of your audience who love to get down into details.
Increasing your referral traffic
If you don’t have an established website audience or have just started your website, you have a long road of SEO optimization and content creation ahead of you before you start seeing consistent organic traffic from search engines.
The way to initially kick off your website traffic is through PPC and referral marketing, and social is a great channel for the latter.
Unlike SEO where you wait for your content to be indexed and recognized, you can instantly grow your social channels for free through a killer hashtag strategy and community management.
Once you have an audience on social media channels, link back to your website in your social media post copy. Remember to also add your website root domain on channels like LinkedIn and Facebook that have a designated section for your business website. On Instagram, where you can’t directly paste clickable links in your post captions, you can utilize third-party tools to link multiple pieces of your website content in your bio.
The advice above is also applicable to traffic to social media from websites. If you’re a long-standing brand that’s just jumping on the social media bandwagon, having CTAs to connect on social scattered around your website will make it easier for your audience to find you on all platforms.
Reviving evergreen content
Perhaps you shared a blog post last year that connects to a topic that’s trending here and now, and you have a much larger audience on your socials today than you did when you first published the piece.
You don’t have to repeat yourself like a parrot, simply put the spotlight back onto your existing well-written content by resharing it on social media.
Reviving your old content won’t just make it more visible to your social media audience, it may actually help it rank better. Search ranking factors include not only using the right keywords and images, but how the content performs in terms of user behavior (traffic acquisition, sessions, views, time spent on a page, etc.).
Sparing your creative juices
If you have a few landing pages on your website that constantly drive organic traffic, then you’re set for quite some time and you can allow yourself to have a blogging break. The same, however, doesn’t apply to social media.
Social media is based on reach and impressions that are mostly driven by a consistent posting cadence. The second you take a longer break, you need to start all over again.
In the beginning, we said you don’t want your marketing to be a copy-paste job; and you don’t. Well, most of the time – each “rule” has its exceptions. In this case, repurposing content when you’re on the brink of burnout is one of those exceptions.
There are a variety of different social media tools out there that allow you to plan, schedule and analyze your content all in one place. Revisiting your old blog posts to pull quotes and images, then have them automatically post when you’re away is a good strategy to ensure you still retain a regular posting cadence and brand consistency.
Doing this once or twice a week on a regular basis is also acceptable, which can ensure your accounts get enough traction to keep going without needing to reinvent the wheel every day. Just make sure you still put up new and refreshing content equally as often.
If you need help developing a content strategy for your brand or business, then reach out to us here.