2018 wasn’t all that long ago (4 years) but in that short amount of time the landscape of social media marketing and digital marketing has changed dramatically. Today, we live in the world of the Influencer, paid ads, and taking advantage of multiple platforms. While many of you were already doing this in 2018, none of us truly understood at the time why these things were important and just how easily we could use them to amplify a brand’s message and mission. We’ve updated this post (updates in bold) to make it more relevant in 2021.
Most of the content you create is only as valuable as the number of people that see it. Bold statement? Maybe. But it’s true. For a Marketing Director, there’s almost nothing worse than spending thousands a year crafting blog posts, shooting marketing videos, and recording podcasts to have that content seen by only a few dozen people. Publishing content isn’t enough to move the marketing needle. You also need to have a plan in place for how you are going to amplify your content.
Amplification is the strategy you incorporate (alongside your content publishing strategy) to increase the reach and visibility of your content on the internet. Below we’ve broken down four methods your brand can use to amplify marketing content using social media.
Why Is Content Amplification So Important?
If every content post you ever published to social media was seen by a million people and received a million clicks, you wouldn’t need to worry about amplification. But this isn’t the reality we live in. Organic reach in social media is pretty much non-existent today. More than half of all content that gets posted to social media receives zero shares, and almost none (.1%) gets shared more than 1,000 times.
In 2021, this is unfortunately still true. In 2019, Trust Insights conducted a study where they analyzed 1.4 million Instagram profiles. At the start of the study user engagement was 1.54% and 3 months later it dropped to a mere 0.9%
If you want to get your content seen by more people, publishing one time to your Facebook page isn’t going to get the job done. You need to incorporate and execute on social media amplification strategies that take your content across multiple platforms, newsfeeds, and publishers.
Social Media Amplification Strategies
Use An Advocacy Marketing Program To Leverage Your Biggest Fans
A well-managed advocacy marketing program is an amplification strategy on steroids! In an advocacy marketing program, your biggest fans sign up to receive your latest content straight to their email inbox. They can then choose to share that content directly onto their personal social channels – which has a much higher organic reach rate than a brand-owned social channel.
The more advocates you have in your program, the greater the number of personal social channels your content can appear on. Even better, we’ve found that each advocate is connected to (on average) around 600 people.
This means if 100 people share your content through your advocacy marketing program, your content has the potential to be seen by 60,000 people! If 1,000 people share, that’s 600,000 people that could potentially see your content.
You can learn more about starting an advocacy marketing program by checking out our blog post here.
Harness The Power Of Influencer Marketing
With an advocacy marketing program, your focus is on the everyday social media user that has between 500 and 9,000 individuals in their social media networks. Once you start engaging with individuals with more than 10,000 fans, you’ve crossed into the realm of influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing can be a powerful vehicle for amplifying your social media content. Essentially, instead of having 100 people share their content to 60,000 people, you work with a single individual to share your content to their 10,000-person-plus social networks.
In addition to having a larger social following than the average social media user, influencers have also built a reputation as a trusted source of information. Even more so, their following may use the influencer as a content source for their own personal feeds, meaning that if an influencer has a network of 100,000 followers, any post shared to their network may then be shared and re-shared by their followers (and their follower’s followers depending on the strength of the content).
When working with an influencer, it’s important to keep these best practices in mind:
- Most influencers (but not all) tend to expect to be compensated in some form for sharing your content
- Influencer marketing is relationship marketing. It’s best to think of an influencer as an ongoing marketing partner who can amplify your content over a series of posts/months
- Utilize unique URL UTM codes (or other tracking technologies) to track the effectiveness of a specific influencer in driving traffic or sales in addition to generating reach and content engagement.
Influencer marketing in 2018, Influencer Marketing was really kicking into high gear. Before 2018, influencers were reserved mostly for celebrities and the social elite. Today, influencers are all around us. You might even know a few yourself. In 2021, influencer marketing is expected to grow to a market size of $13.8 billion. In the early days of influencer marketing, brands like yourself likely looked to those with tens or even hundreds of thousands of followers. However, today, the nano and micro-influencer is just as influential, if not more, than the big guys. Why? Because the little guys are often more engaged with your audiences than the bigger accounts.
The best part about influencer marketing? It’s often free or relatively low cost in comparison to traditional marketing efforts. Many influencers accept forms of payment in product and free perks. Influencers that do charge often charge far less than what it would cost to create and execute a strategic marketing strategy via digital or print. Whether you like them or not, influencer mark
Promote Your Posts Through Native Social Media Advertising Platforms
Promoted posts, sponsored Tweets, pre-roll video ads. Regardless of the format, almost all social media networks now offer a way for your brand to pay to promote their content and increase both its reach and its visibility.
If you’re going to incorporate promoted posts into your amplification strategy, be sure to keep these tips in mind:
- If you are working with a limited promotional budget, be sure to only promote your very best content.
- Additionally, consider only promoting content that supports your sales funnel, i.e. any content that links back to your website, promotes a sale, or markets an event. Posting a cool image of an employee eating a taco for #TacoTuesday might get you a lot of likes once you promote it, but that isn’t necessarily going to translate into ROI.
- Always keep your promoted post audiences in mind. Do you market your post to people that like your page? Or new people? Do you target by gender, age, interests? Not all people will respond to all content equally. Be sure to tailor your spend to target those most likely to engage
- When in doubt, remarket. Use promoted posts to incorporate another touch point into your nurturing cycle. Showing a prospect or potential customer a small piece of content is an easy way to keep your brand top-of-mind.
While influencer marketing is a great way to reach new audiences that you otherwise wouldn’t, paid targeted marketing is the best and most cost effective form to capture sales. Paid ads can cost literal pennies per click offering high ROIs on your ads. Recently, 27% of people stated that they found new products or services through targeted ads. Additionally, 60% of people stated that paid ads targeted at them resulted in more impulse purchases. Right place and right time are just as important online as it is offline.
Publish Across Multiple Platforms
By now, most brands understand the need to publish content across multiple social channels. Even if you don’t cultivate a presence across every single channel, most brands are going to be on at least two or three of the big Social Six: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat.
Remember, amplification is all about having your content make as much noise as possible in the social space. By publishing your content on different social media networks, you’re increasing your content exposure.
However, if you’re stopping at just these six networks, you might be cutting your content short. Depending on the nature and style of your marketing content, there’s plenty of other social networks that allow for your fans to see your content including:
- Medium
- Hacker News
- Imgur
- Discord
In general, you want to ensure your content is published on as many platforms as possible.
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There’s no doubt that content marketing is an effective marketing tool. It has an enormous impact on your site’s SEO, sales funnel, and awareness-building initiatives; however, your target audience must first see it for your content to fulfill these missions. Start driving content marketing ROI by focusing on a strong social media amplification strategy.
Ready to get started amplifying your social media content? Schedule a free demo of SocialToaster today to learn about how your brand can amplify your content using the power of advocacy marketing.
