7 Ways to Increase Marketing Content Visibility on Social Media in 2021 (Updated June 2021)

Increase Marketing Content Visibility

Is it just us, or does it seem like it’s getting harder and harder for your content to be seen by your audiences on social media? Posts that earned thousands of views in 2017 are now lucky to see a couple hundred views today in 2018. However, this lack of visibility isn’t stopping brands from investing more marketing dollars into content creation. Content marketing is projected to become a $300 billion dollar industry by 2019. So how can you ensure an ROI on your content marketing expense and increase your organic reach on social media?

We’ve put together a short list of 4 7 killer ways to immediately increase marketing content visibility on social media networks.

We wrote this in 2018, and since then content marketing has grown from a “nice-to-have” to a marketing necessity. Not only are brands producing more content for their websites and social media presence, but they are also expanding to different types of content. To help brands continue to increase marketing content visibility, we’re shaking the rust off this post and updating it with fresh content for 2021. All updates are in bold. 

The Current State of Organic Content Reach

But first, ask yourself a question: Am I crazy? Is my content really being seen by fewer people?

Over the past several years, organic reach on social media has steadily declined to its current state of between 1% – 2%. In other words, if a brand has 100,000 followers on Facebook, it can only expect to have between 1,000 and 2,000 followers see the content on their Facebook news feed. Google won’t save your content either. In fact, there’s a 90% chance your content will see zero traffic from search engines.

Bottom line, it’s the responsibility of your brand (and not the platform) to ensure your content gets seen.

This was true in 2018. In 2021, organic content reach is even less. This is due to a combination of two factors, the tightening of discovering algorithms and the sheer volume of new content being produced by brands. 

4 7 Ways to Increase Marketing Content Visibility on Social Media

Every social media campaign needs to have a distribution and amplification strategy. These four seven can get you started.

1) Advocacy Marketing

If you’re not familiar with advocacy marketing, no worries. It’s become a bit of a buzzword over the last few years. It’s essentially just getting people to talk about your brand, product, or services by sharing your content in their personal social media news feed and engaging with your brand online. Advocacy marketing is a powerful tool for increasing content visibility because it leverages the social-sharing power of your biggest fans and customers. With the help of your loyal fans, you can easily boost branded engagement, increase customer trust and loyalty, and drive sales.

The average individual on social media has a reach of about 600 people. If you have 1,000 people in your advocacy marketing program, your content has the potential to be seen by 600,000 connected users. With advocacy marketing, you create an engaging environment where you and your audience get to have fun together. To ensure a successful advocacy marketing campaign, here are some best practices to keep in mind:

Recruit Advocates Early, Recruit Advocates Often

The effectiveness of your advocacy marketing program has a direct correlation to the number of fans that join the program. Strong advocacy marketing programs are built on a solid recruitment strategy. Your recruitment message should be compelling and in line with your program landing page. Then, drive individuals to your program landing page to learn more about the program and sign up to join.

If you’re an established brand without an advocacy marketing program, it’s not too late to get started. You can find more tips on how to design a great program here.

Incentivize Sharing

Everyone loves earning prizes and being compensated for their efforts! You can increase the frequency at which your advocates sharing your content by incentivizing your program. Award points, extra entries into a sweepstake, or even a guaranteed award for reaching a certain threshold to encourage your advocates to participate in your program over the long haul.

Use a Professional Advocacy Marketing Platform

No one has time to fiddle with spreadsheets and bulk emails. To better ensure a successful advocacy marketing program that you and your customers can enjoy, consider using a professional advocacy marketing platform like SocialToaster.

An enterprise-level fan engagement platform makes it easy for your brand to recruit new advocates, award prizes, and encourage users to share your content by making the whole process seamless and user-friendly.

2) Pay to Promote Your Content

By far, the easiest (but not cheapest) way to help your content get seen by more people is to pay to amplify your content. Paying to promote your content is a great way to get your product, service or content in front of people who would actually find value in it and benefit from it.

If you can afford it.

There are several channels available for paid content promotion, but here are four of our favorite to increase marketing content visibility:

Paid Content Syndication

Did you know that certain blogs and online publishing platforms accept paid promotional pieces? While some blogs may publish your post for free (depending on the value it offers), many charge a sponsored post fee, which is why we’re calling this section Paid Content Syndication.

The good news, even if a reader knows that the blog post they’re reading is a paid-for blog entry, it doesn’t necessarily stop them from reading the post. In fact, they may very well praise the blog for including the post, as long as that post provided them with significant value.

Only use your best performing content when working with a paid syndication network. You also want to be sure the publisher is aligned with your brand image and your target audience.

Sponsored Social Media Posts

Sponsored posts are a smart way to increase marketing content visibility on specific social media sites. Using the social media platforms native advertising platforms, you can select who sees your sponsored post based on specific demographic, geographic, and psychographic criteria to ensure you spend your dollars directly on your target market.

Here are some best practices to be aware of when sponsoring posts:

1) Test Multiple Audiences – Testing multiple audiences allows you to find the specific audience makeup that works best for you. It also allows you to find openings for potential new audiences.

2) Don’t Be Afraid to Sponsor “Old” Content – You’ve probably written or produced some great content over the years. Don’t be afraid to give that old content some new light. If your audience is growing, chances are the newcomers haven’t gotten to see your older content. Put some dollars behind your most popular content in order to extend its useful life.

3) Choose the Best Buying Mechanics – Each social media platform provides brands with the opportunity to name their own buying mechanic. When purchasing ads, be sure to choose the mechanic that most aligns with your goals. Cost Per Click (CPC) campaigns are optimized for driving click traffic directly to your blog or website. Cost Per Video View (CPV) campaigns increase views on specific videos that you’ve published to your social media sites. Cost Per Engagement (CPE) campaigns drive engagement (likes, comments, shares) to specific posts that you’ve published to social pages. There are also other platform-specific optimizations that you can take advantage of to drive actions within those platforms.

3) Have your Employees Promote Your Content

We talked earlier about using the social-sharing power of your biggest fans to promote your content, but did you know you can also tap your employees to help increase your content’s visibility on social media?

Employee advocacy is a powerful tool that brings with it some major ROI points. Brands that use employee advocacy can see up to a 5x increase in web traffic. They can also earn 25% more new business leads. But how do you get your employees to share your content?

Create Content that Speaks to Your Employees

If you’re going to ask your employees to share your content, make sure it is content that your employees are going to care about. Sharing a mix of content that excites and engages your employees will improve the likelihood that they share your content. Some examples of successful employee advocacy content include:

  • Announcements of new positions or career opportunities with your company
  • Content that promotes company growth
  • Pieces on company culture
  • Inspirational content geared towards supporting the growth of your employees

4) Create Great Content

Here it is, the last bit of our sage advice: if you want to increase content views, you need to create amazing, great, wonderful, powerful content. While this might be a total “no-brainer” it’s actually a little more complicated than that. Even the best content is subject to the whims of the various social media algorithms. These algorithms punish brands that put out mediocre content with low visibility and reward those that put out great content with higher visibility.

In 2018, the “content du jour” is video. Did you know that nearly 43% of people want to see more video content from brands? Almost 50% of Internet users are looking for videos related to a product or service before they even consider going into a store. What this means that the social media algorithms are going to reward brands that use video as part of their content marketing mix by giving that video more organic reach on their social media platform.

So what is great content anyway?

  • Great content is content that is useful. You want to create content that adds value and benefits your audience in some way. For example, teaching your audience a new use for your product or introducing a helpful new service.
  • Great content is content that educates. People love to learn why your product or service stands apart from the rest. Educating them on this gives them bragging points, which is exactly what you want. People bragging = people talking and sharing.
  • Great content is content that makes people say, “Wow!”. Unique point-of-view shots, stunning locations, and strategic pops of color are just a few ways you can make people stop scrolling and say, “wow.” Exclusive infographics and inspiring quotes can also bring out that “wow” factor.

When these factors are in alignment, your chances of getting your content in front of consumers on social media increases exponentially.

5) Utilize Influencer Marketing 

Did you know that in 2021 influencer marketing is expected to be worth $13.8 billion? Influencer marketing is like having a huge marketing team, highly creative content creators, and access to hundreds of different niches, all for pennies on the dollar. Maybe you’ve heard bad things about influencer marketing or worry that they look like they’re “for sale.”

But influencers are like a great friend who always knows the best products and hottest new spots. These influencers can gently guide their audience to your products or service in a way that feels organic and natural. You can build long-term relationships with influencers that develop and evolve that benefit both your business and the influencers. 

6) Outward Organic Engagement 

They don’t call it social media just for kicks. Outward organic engagement can help increase the number of eyes that your content sees. Successful outward organic engagement can be as easy as committing to 10 minutes a day engaging with your audience. Outward organic engagement looks like: 

  • Responding to comments 
  • Engaging with user’s content by leaving a fun comment or asking a question
  • Exploring and engaging with hashtags in your niche 
  • Looking through stories and engaging with them

Outward organic engagement can help you build a strong relationship with your audience that not only increases your visibility but increases your audience’s desire to actually want to seek out your content. 

7) Don’t Forget to Use AltText 

For the time being, search engines are only designed to populate search results based on words. This means that your images can get lost when users aren’t sure what to search. You may have the perfect solution or product for your customer, but they may never be able to find it. Why? Because they aren’t searching using the right words. 

AltText improves your SEO, helps the search engines better understand what your image is, allows users with poor internet connections to understand what your image is, and finally, it assists the visually impaired in being able to view your content. You don’t need to understand coding or be a computer whiz to add AltText. Many social media platforms make it easy for you to add AltText prior to posting. Already have tons of content posted with no AltText? Don’t sweat it! These same platforms often allow you to edit your images to add AltText after posting. 

Need a strategic partner to help you increase marketing content visibility? Let us know!

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