The hardest part of any marketing strategy is maintaining it and the same is true for Social Media Marketing (SMM). The most frequent complaint we here from clients or social media enthusiasts is the time and trouble they spend keeping their message consistent and uniform across all their social platforms and ensuring the platforms are all kept regularly up to date.
It’s a problem we understand well here at Crush, it’s something we’ve all experienced too and it’s easy to lose sight of your SMM strategy’s end goal when your trapped inside the social networking world.
One quick easy solution is to use your company blog to broadcast your website’s content by synchronising it with other social media sites. It’s not a long term solution because you still don’t tackle the problem of two-way communication, but in the short term it’s an easy way to generate activity on your social profiles. A blog is quick and easy to maintain – one article a week is enough to maintain visibility in Google searches and provides enough new information to keep supporters coming back to read more. Synchronising the blog with relevant social networks allows you to publish your blog content on multiple social profiles, keeping them updated and maintained without the man hours.
Content from your blog can also be used to automatically populate your newsletters, reducing the administrative hours needed to create an email campaign. It’s also a good way to ensure important or interesting news is likely to be read by your clients, who may themselves be too short of time to actively read your blog every week. The newsletter can be used almost like an RSS feed, to bring your clients and other newsletter readers the most important snippets of your blog; and with analytics tools installed in most email marketing systems, you’ll be able to track which blogs are most popular and adjust your articles accordingly.
A well maintained blog can also augment the leads a website receives – it has a positive effect on organic ranks as your site has more searchable content that search engines use to rank you in search results. The blog can also provide third parties with an RSS feed, maximising your visibility on the web by promoting your content on multiple sites, making it even easier for people to find, read, and act upon.
Whilst synchronising your blog to social media platforms enables you to broadcast your websites content in a uniform manner, some budding writers still struggle to find enough content in the first place. In this instance, Crush recommend using a news aggregator system, like our Communicator tool, which enables you to get updates from multiple web sources including industry websites, policy think tanks and news sites. You have complete editorial control over this information so you can select the articles of most relevance to your business before publishing them on your website as a collection of interesting posts.
By synchronising this feed with other profiles, including your social media sites, this collection of news can be automatically streamed into news hubs, social networks, article distribution points and other channels. This enables your marketing manager to establish your business as the primary reference point within your industry, marking you out as experts who are pro-active in demonstrating their knowledge.
Aggregating news in this way helps clients or followers stay informed about your business. It gives them multiple ways to contact you and the consistency and regularity with which the information is displayed encourages the public to perceive you as an authority in your area. It’s extremely useful for businesses that are time short and effectively reduces the man hours needed on an SMM campaign for those struggling to manage a more complex strategy.
