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How to Create a Winning Content for 2015 |
How many times has a social media expert told you that in order to succeed online, you have to be “everywhere?” Probably more than once or twice.
It’s a piece of advice repeated so often that we become numb to hearing it over and over. It’s easy to repeat what someone else says, even when you don’t understand the reasoning behind it.
Then there are other thought leaders in the social sphere that will take a slightly different approach, telling you that being “everywhere” is foolish and that you should instead focus your efforts on the platforms that work best for your business.
I like this approach because it has an element of practicality to it that “be everywhere” lacks.
Then the question becomes: how do you know which platforms work best for your products or services unless…you’re everywhere (at least for a while)?
I believe that the best method can be found in the middle of these two suggestions.
Should you continue to spend hours every day building a presence on Pinterest when you have seen no results after six frustrating months? No, not unless you have taken the time to completely revise your strategy for that particular service.
What if you are seeing at least some results from your Pinterest activity? Should you give up and pursue more worthwhile marketing activities? This is a tougher question to answer for most businesses.
This situation puts you at war with your own doubts. Is the hard work paying off or are you wasting your time?
A few important questions to ask yourself at this phase:
- Was your business built overnight?
- What projects in the past have you given up on half way through and abandoned forever?
- What could you have accomplished if you had stuck with it and seen it through to the end?
The good news if you’re seeing results is that whatever platform you’re testing has shown that it can be effective for your type of business. Once you have this confirmation, there is a good chance you can scale it up and make your presence there even more powerful by learning from those with the right experience.
Just to be clear, “being everywhere” is more than having an Pinterest account you signed up for a couple years ago and which has been inactive since then. An account is something you sign up for that anyone can get, while a presence must be built and some are stronger than others.
There is a significant shift taking place in people’s technology habits and their content consumption is morphing right along with it. Increased use of mobile devices, smartphones and tablets has resulted in an increasing demand for visually-based, skimmable content.
Which of these social media platforms are you currently ignoring and leaving out of your marketing?
- Slideshare
- Vine
- Imgur
- Tumblr
Most of us tend to ignore the mediums we are east comfortable with. My craft is writing and the content on Pushing Social certainly reflects this. Most of my content is text based and feels most at home within the context of a blog.
When I began to notice this shift in content variety, I knew it was time to get my hands dirty with some less comfortable mediums. Several months ago, I decided I would start to build an audience on Slideshare by converting some of the top posts from Pushing Social into presentations that told the story with more images and fewer words.
It does require time to do this, but the efforts are beginning to drive more traffic to the blog and there are plenty of tools that can help you create visual content quickly and without any design skills.
In fact, I’ve done some research on the concept of visual marketing and the stats I uncovered basically convinced me to start paying more attention to what I will call my “content marketing mix,” as I enter 2015 and beyond.
It’s not enough to just write blog posts anymore and I will be implementing several additional platforms in the near future, including more podcast episodes soon to come.
Want proof that visual content is taking over and get some great tips for how to get started with it for your business? Click here to download my special report on the visual content marketing boom.
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