In a world of paid advertising, organic promotion on social media is becoming a thing of the past and if you want to succeed, you’ll have to learn the tricks of the trade, and fast. In this article, we’ll show you how to promote content on social media so that you get the biggest bang for your buck.
Let’s start with the bad news. Organic reach on social media is practically dead. Half of the content gets literally zero reposts, and the other half has a chance of about 0.1% to be reposted up to 1000 times without paid promotion tools. Facebook algorithms are in no hurry to show your publications to users for free, so you can’t hope for free traffic in 2021.
Realistic content marketing in 2021
Most beginners really hope that by creating quality content they can get free traffic. |After all, it seems easy enough. Write cool content, post it on social platforms, get likes, sharers, and reach! Unfortunately, that’s not how it works anymore.
Even if your content is amazing, social media giants will be in no hurry to promote it unless they can make money from it. Therefore, to attract an audience you will need to plan an advertising budget and develop a realistic content promotion strategy.
What does a realistic content marketing strategy for developing your resources look like?
- You create truly relevant, interesting, relevant content and post it regularly on your sites.
- You selectively promote the posts with the best response from your existing, albeit small, audience using the platform’s advertising capabilities.
- Use #hashtags (they still work). This can help you get into the selection of relevant publications in the search engine and extend the reach of the post.
- Track interactions with advertised publications using trackers to then gather an audience for remarketing (aka retargeting).
- Use retargeting - set up re-shows of your top publications to the audience who showed interest in them the first time they interacted with you. This reminds them that you exist and you can further persuade them to buy something, subscribe or register.
- Gathering conversions and expanding your audience.
- Repeat the whole cycle over and over again.
Below we offer some simple working tips to increase the effectiveness of your social media advertising, and promotion of your resources in general.
Increase audience engagement rates
The relevance score of your posts is important for increasing your reach. How can you improve this metric? Engage your audience more! How do you get your audience to interact with your posts?
First, by calling for action in the posts themselves e.g. commenting, liking, sharing and subscribing.
Second, create content that promotes engagement - initiate heated discussion, ask questions, ask for an opinion, put a certain reaction, tag a friend in the comments, etc. All of this will help you when promoting a post for a fee to increase its reach naturally, thus lowering the price of advertising.
By tracking this indicator for specific posts, it will be easier for you to analyze which content is cheaper to promote, and to place emphasis on such publications in the future. The better the audience reacts to the post before it is promoted, the cheaper will be its advertising in the future.
Set up targeting by interest
When working to increase engagement metrics, track the interests of your audience. Demographics are good, but they can often sink your entire advertising budget because they don’t tell you anything specific about your audience other than gender and age.
By setting up targeting by audience interests, which you figure out based on the data you already have (which posts generated the most attention from users), it will be easier for you to lower your ad price and get the best results.
Get free bonuses on paid promotion
We’ve talked before about how to increase engagement rates so that paid posts naturally get more reach. The important thing to note here is that the better you work on your content, the more free bonuses you’ll get when promoting it.
For example, by promoting a post with a touching video on a social topic in which your promotional offer is intelligently embedded, you can get a lot of comments and reposts. Thus, even after the end of the advertising campaign, you can still get subscribers and conversions.
The opposite is also important. If any of your posts have become organically more popular than the others, start promoting them! Insert an advertising link and feel free to send them for paid promotion. Such posts are called “unicorns” in Western marketing. Often, such a unicorn can bring much more conversions than the most elaborate promotional post with a big budget for promotion.
Adapt content to different sites
When creating content for Facebook, you can easily adapt it for Instagram, for example, by changing the image and editing the structure of your post.
You can also adapt existing content for other platforms. For example, for LinkedIn. This platform has long gone beyond the narrow limits of searching for employees and posting vacancies. By scrolling through the feed on LinkedIn, you can find lots of useful posts with videos, infographics, and photos. You can also reach the right audience here based on the professions that are most common among your consumer audience.
Videos created for posting and promotion on YouTube can be posted and promoted on other platforms too. You can also change the format of the content, for example, by posting frames from the video with subtitles as a separate post on the same Facebook and Instagram. You can also publish a short teaser of the video in the post, and give a full link to it in the stories or in the profile description. The rule for successful distribution of content on various platforms is a competent adaptation to the format of the social network.
Always optimize content for SEO
In Google search results you can often find not only links to blogs with posted articles on the topic you are looking for, but also pictures, videos, and news. Each of your content can be optimized for SEO by simple tagging and using keywords.
For example, when posting a video on YouTube, make sure to compose the description in such a way that it includes the natural occurrence of keywords on the topic. In this case, you significantly increase the chances of the content gaining organic reach from search results, multiplying your efforts to promote the video in question.
The natural occurrence of search queries, which can be collected in advance in the same Google Ads keyword planner, will make your content more accessible to your online audience.
Use retargeting
Social media remarketing (or retargeting) on average increases engagement by a factor of 3, and increases conversion rates by a factor of 2. At the same time, your costs are reduced by a third. So make the most of it and make the most of it!
Social media retargeting works really well with complex offers such as subscriptions, consultations, and app downloads. When a customer sees an ad for the first time, they may be hesitant, but are already thinking about purchasing the product. Repeatedly showing the ad to the target audience increases the awareness of the offer and encourages a quicker response, e.g. a purchase (or other targeted action).
Take a comprehensive approach
These days, all means are good when it comes to content promotion. Don’t ignore any of the points if you want to reach as many people as possible and recoup your investment in content creation and promotion.
So, let’s review and consolidate:
- follow a realistic content marketing strategy in 2021;
- create only unique and truly engaging content;
- focus on the interests of your audience;
- track your engagement rate;
- optimize any of your content for SEO;
- adapt the content before posting it to the format of the selected network;
- use advanced targeting capabilities;
- Apply retargeting to “unicorn” posts;
- combine all methods of paid and free promotion.
By taking a comprehensive and realistic approach to social media and promotional publications, you will get better results. Of course, you can ignore the strategy if you’re used to playing it fast and loose with short-term results. But if you’re really ready to pump up social media, grow in affiliate marketing and work for the future, this approach should be the foundation for your social media efforts.
Experts say that the future belongs to Influencer Marketing. We talk about it in our publications, the whole world is talking about it. To build a long-term, promising business, you need to think now about an effective strategy for blogging in social networks, as well as networking with Influencers. Better yet, become an Influencer yourself!