How to Make Content Marketing for Social Media Work for You

 

Today I attended a webinar at Social Media Today hosted by C.C. Chapman, Ann Handley, and Maggie Fox, which covered the topic “content marketing for social media.” In the hour that they let their expertise shine, I discovered a wealth of insight that I wanted to highlight here in case you missed it.

Content Marketing: What is it and who does it well?

Content marketing is anything you create and share to tell the story of your brand and/or company. You can ask yourself, “How does our product help people?”

Two companies that C.C. and Ann covered who are doing content marketing for social media well right now are the following:

Burberry: They are doing a fantastic job with over 454,000 followers on Instagram right now and it’s not unusual to see someone with an iPhone next to the runway taking pictures. Burberry has a great mix of raw and professional photos that keep them popular on social media.

Oscar de la Renta: OscarPRGirl uses Pinterest to tell a story about the brand whether it’s through sketches of the designs or fashion shows they appear at. Their 27,458 followers on Pinterest demonstrate the success of the medium.

But you don’t have to have a big budget like those two examples to create great content marketing. With a high-quality camera phone, you can take pictures of happy customers and your product in use to spread your very own content marketing. The power of social media is connecting with potential customers in their daily lives by telling the story of your brand. Be flawsome.

What’s “flawsome?” It’s being awesome because of your flaws, not in spite of them.

Tool Examples in Content Marketing

Some of their favorite content tools mentioned include the following:

Instagram – Many people use this simple app on iPhone and Android to share pictures and it’s proven to be a great way to share marketing content.

Vyclone – The concept behind this app is that many people in one place can take a video of the same thing and it’ll upload all the videos to make one solid video from multiple angles. I imagine it’s like that Beastie Boys documentary.

Over – This app is simple in the fact that it lets you add words over pictures. It’s for those people that love ads and equally for those that want to make memes straight from a mobile device.

List.ly – This tool lets you create lists out of information you have and also curate lists.

Of course, not every brand needs every tool at their disposal, so study what works for your brand and go from there. Not all brands can be storytellers and there’s nothing wrong with hiring someone to come in to tell your story for you. Again, you can do something like this at every budget level whether you hire a whole agency or just a journalist.

One last tip from C.C. Chapman is as follows:

“If you want to start creating things, start today. Don’t wait.”