There is an adage that 20% of your time should be spent on producing content, and the other 80% on promoting it. A successful content marketing plan should involve recycling and reusing content across networks and throughout time (for evergreen content, especially). This should be inline with your team’s editorial calendar.
Audio Content
Audio content is useful because it grants the listener flexibility as to how they consume it. They can listen to it while exercising, driving, or have it play in the background, so it can be digested during times when visual contact isn’t an option.
Radio is all but dead, and podcasts seem to be in fashion these days. For uploading podcasts, you should go with Apple’s iTunes and Google Play as the primary channels. By using Anchor.fm, you can syndicate to those, along with quite a few other podcasting platforms for you; similar to LibSyn.
You can promote your podcast on social media platforms like Facebook & Instagram.
Once you have the audio content ready, there are a few things that you do to extrapolate it
Turning audio files into videos
Anchor.fm is a podcasting platform with a few special features. You can upload your audio files and Anchor will transform them into transcribed videos. You can manually edit the captions, but they are usually quite accurate.
Additionally, one can simply combine the audio with a static image in order to produce a video. Nathan Townsend’s EZ Converter is a simple tool that can do this for you online.
Native Video Content
There’s no question that native video content is securing its position as the lingua franca of social media (especially on mobile).
For each video you publish, you will need to prepare a title, description, tags/keywords, and a custom thumbnail image.
Video is the highest order of content because once you have produced a video, you can then turn it into four more types of content (audio, text, images, and more videos).
Live Video Streaming
Facebook Live & YouTube are the top platforms for live streaming, at least outside of gaming.
For gaming streams, Twitch.tv is the dominant platform, with quite a few others as well.
Restream.io is a neat tool that helps you simultaneously broadcast to over 30 platforms.
One key aspect of live video is managing and responding to live comments.
One the broadcast is concluded, you can then break down
Long/Medium Format Videos
YouTube
YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world, after Google (whose parent company, Alphabet, also owns YouTube). It is an ideal network to publish HD & wide-angle format videos. Connect your associated website and take advantage of their new “cards” feature (replacement for annotations). Use Playlists to sort and group your videos into categories, especially ones that others are searching for. Whenever sharing and/or embedding YouTube videos, you should do so from playlists, so -that you can control which video plays next (instead of the customized algorithm that varies for each user)
Facebook videos can still be embedded, but the real magic lies with the sharing functionality and the associated network effects that are generated.
Facebook Watch is an interface for content creators to release and publish episodic videos.
Through Facebook ads, videos can be targeted at a certain audience, and any video viewers can be later retargeted as a custom audience in other ads.
Use the right hashtags and contextual mentions. Square videos can be posted up to 1:00 in length, while Instagram’s new vertical video portal, IGTV, allows for up to an hour of video content.
Video – Upload via their media studio, so that you can insert a Call-to-Action URL (Watch/Learn More), as well as a title and description.
While you must consider whether to retweet popular content that you don’t benefit from, you can create Twitter Moments to curate other videos & tweets into collections.
LinkedIn Video can provide metrics on which companies viewers work at and what their titles are (collectively).
Short Format (Ten-fifteen seconds) Video Clips
For each of these, they only last 24 hours, so they are daily commitments. You can usually see which individual users have watched your stories.
Snapchat
Instagram Stories
Messenger Day & Facebook Stories
You can then combine archived clips into a long-form video.
Take note that certain videos will perform better on certain platforms. This can depend on the format (HD vs. vertical), type of content (travel, gaming, business, etc.), and the audience of the network itself.
For example, this below LinkedIn native video has accumulated over 8,000 video views on LinkedIn, which is astronomically better than it has done on other platforms.
Written Content (Text/Copy)
Implementing a cross-network publishing strategy should effectively augment your written content’s growth. Your own domain should take priority for search engine purposes, but other platforms have their own internal search functions and network effects that you could benefit from. Open Blogging Platforms can vary from industry to niche, so research what’s available to you.
Blog posts should be on your own domain (not wordpress.com or blogspot). Link back to your site when syndicating or re-publishing content, and have the originally include extra content that isn’t on the other networks. Essentially, include just enough of the article on other networks as a sort of “tease” in order to drive traffic to your main site. That way your posts don’t cannibalize each other between domains for search rankings.
Posts – News feed posts will will be most effective when posted or shared into groups or your personal profile. Links should go in the comments in order to increase reach.
Facebook Notes – I don’t see this feature being utilized nearly enough. If you are distributing long-form text (articles) on Facebook, this would be an ideal format to use for it.
Medium
Medium articles provide a cleanly-designed reading interface for users. You can create your own publication, write for an existing one, or publish organically. Similar to Tumblr, you can also create a white-label blog using your own domain.
Articles – These are not as effective as they used to be. At first, you would receive a notification each time someone in your network published a post, but that’s no longer the case. MeetEdgar’s blog outlines the pros and cons of LinkedIn articles.
Posts – Since the acquisition by Microsoft, LinkedIn’s news feed activity and engagement has skyrocketed. Their algorithm blends elements of both Facebook (links has less weight) and Twitter (hashtags).
Create a Twitter card in the Twitter ads interface to use in organic tweets (that can also be automated once the link is created).
Visual Content (Images & Graphics)
Images, Memes, Quotes, & Infographics can be shared on just about any network. Include Pinterest for these.
Canva is a simple tool for creating pre-size image templates for each social network. It’s easy enough that you don’t need to be a professional graphic designer to use. They offer a variety of layouts to choose from, which you can then edit to fit your needs.
Outside of video, images are the primary format on Instagram, and you should create a library of content that you can share on there.
Try to keep you creative assets consistent with your brand. One example is that when driving traffic to a particular blog post or other piece of content, design your email opt-in popup graphics to match the article.
Case Study: The Marketing Automation Discussion Podcast by Alex Glenn & Karan Sharma
I have been a guest on their show several times, and we discussed various topics, such as B2B Chat Bots, B2B Marketing on Facebook, and a B2B sales lead nurturing strategy.
Here is their process:
- Find a question on Quora to answer.
- Brainstorm and plan a Google Docs that acts as both the answer on Quora and the script to follow when recording the episode.
- The host, Alex, casts his desktop computer screen using Loom for the video.
- Simultaneously, he initiates a podcast recording call in Anchor.fm to record the audio.
This content creation process yields:
A blog post, which should be first posted onto your own domain, indexed by Google (“fetch” within search console), and then finally posted onto Quora (with a link back to your posted, along with an embedded video).
An audio podcast (with minimal editing needed), which is then published / syndicated to major platforms via Anchor.fm
A video, which can be published directly to Facebook & YouTube, and divided into 10-minute segments for LinkedIn Video.