When it comes to all kind of digital marketing, the game has shifted from simple, shallow and easy distribution to relationship building. If you’ve ever been in any kind of relationship, you know that building real relationships takes a lot of work. You really have to focus on the needs of that other person. You really have to look for some sort of win-win situation.
It doesn’t happen over night and takes a consistent effort on both your part. But the great thing about relationships is that once you get going, it continues to pay off for both parties for a long time to come. To say that you need to build better relationships to turbo charge your digital marketing efforts would be to point out the obvious.
The bottom line is if you want to maximize the visibility of the brand you are building, you have to go beyond mere content distribution. You have to build relationships. One of the most important platforms for doing this of course is social media.
There are many different brands in all niches on social media.Its very easy to see the category leaders. You just need to look up their facebook accounts. You just need to check out their pages, groups or you can look them up on twitter. It very easy to find out.
However, reverse engineering their success takes a little bit more effort. The good news is you don’t have to have a budget reaching in to the millions of dollars to pull this off. You don’t have to have some sort of multi-billion dollar corporation backing you to be able to build a solid brand using social media marketing. You just have to have a very discriminating eye when it comes to third party content. That’s right! I’m talking about content curation.
Content curation involves taking the content produced by third parties. And publicising them in the social media accounts. Ideally, you should comment on these links and then explain why people should pay attention. Call people to action so they’re more likely to click on this content.
When you perform content curation properly, you kill two birds over one stone. You not only drive traffic to a website that features really high quality content but you satisfy the needs of the people following your social media accounts or highly specific niche relevant content. Best of all, you are building credibility for your brand by collecting the very best content that is directly tied tight to your niche.
In other words you become some sort of authority and expert because people can rely on you to post only relevant pieces of content when it comes to a certain topic category. Its too easy to find accounts, twitter and elsewhere that would just post all sorts of popular content. You go from figuring out how to set up a multi-million dollar webpage backed up by all sort of scientific data to
a post featuring a happy cat that could give people high fives. How much credibility do you think that kind of account will generate?
Sure that facebook page might get a lot of likes but let me tell you not all those people are going to take that persons credibility very seriously. They find that person,the page owner entertaining, but not much else. If you want to be taken seriously, then your social media accounts must remain on message. It must be tightly focused on your niche’ parameters like a laser. If you’re
able to do that, then regardless of the fact that you are publishing link after link of a website that go everywhere except to your own blog, you will do well.
Real content curation is never a traffic leak
Since you are building credibility and allowing your brand to piggy back on solid content produced by experts in your field. You are not losing anything. A lot of rookies in social media marketing think that your are basically giving away valuable traffic when you do content curation. They don’t know what they are talking about. Seriously.
Please understand when people seek you out of social media or you’re trying to track people on social media, what do you have to track them with? That’s right! You have to attract them with content.
And unfortunately, you probably don’t have all the money and time in the world to produce the kind of content that they’re looking for. This is why you do content curation. Its a win-win situation. People then keep coming back to your account because they know you can be relied on to post only the very best. Even though this is not your own content. Even though this doesn’t go to your own brand. They don’t care. They know that they that they can rely on your account to find the very best.
Build your authority through curation
What I love about curation is that its cheap. and it doesn’t take much time. as long as you know what you’re looking for and as long as you have a really tight editorial parameter, you will be able to find a wide range of pre-existing content that can build your authority. Use curation to create a triple win situation.
First, your visitors win. When they follow you, they can rest assure that you will only feature the very best content in the niche they interested in.
Second, the creators of your curated content win, because the get traffic. They also get credit for the content that you are sindicating.
Third and most importantly, you win. Start developing a solid brand people are assured that when they follow your account on social media platforms that you are not going to steer them wrong. They can rest assured that whatever content you post on your social media accounts will be directly related to whatever it is they’re interested in.
Everybody wins. And once everybody wins you can then start sharing your own content and start pumping highly qualified, highly interested traffic to your target pages. That’s how you make money with social media marketing.
Does it take a long time? Yes. Does it take quite a bit of effort and a discriminating eye? Absolutely. Is it cheap, powerful and effective? You bet. Make no mistake. There are many ways that do social media marketing. But none of them can touch the power effectiveness and rich of content curation.
Best of all, content curation delivers results for dirt cheap.
