Using Social Networks to Promote Your Content

Last time, we addressed interpersonal content promotion. This time — promoting by narrowcasting your content to individuals within your social networks.

If you’ve approached building your LinkedIn and Twitter networks wisely, they’re great channels for narrowcast promotion. You have an audience with an expressed interest in you and your content. Feed it to them.

2 ways to use LinkedIn to promote

LinkedIn features two great opportunities for getting the word out. Status Updates allow you to tell your connections what you’re doing right now. For example, as I’m writing this, mine reads “Brett is writing a post for Tippingpoint Labs about online content promotion.” This status update is displayed alongside my profile. And that’s nice. But the real benefit is that this update is included in periodic emails that LinkedIn sends to everyone in my network.

The Discussions section of LinkedIn groups offers another opportunity to promote. Before creating your content, post a discussion related to your topic. The resulting discussion will aid you in creating the content (think participation creation), and you can use that same discussion to promote the content once it goes live. A secondary benefit of discussions is that they open you up to LinkedIn users beyond your immediate network. Your status updates will be seen only by your network, whereas group activity is visible to any member of that group, whether or not they’re part of your personal LinkedIn network.

Depending on your content and desired audience, Facebook may or may not be the right place for your narrowcast promotion. In most cases, LinkedIn is great for B2B promotion, whereas Facebook is more appropriate for B2C promotion. When narrowcast promoting using Facebook, the same rules for LinkedIn are applicable. Participate beyond promotion and use your status updates and Facebook groups to promote only when appropriate.

Tuning up your Twitter promotion

Twitter is an ideal platform for content promotion when done right. But don’t just copy-paste the title of your content and a link into Twitter — try something different.

With search engines now indexing Tweets, you can maximize your organic search impact by using different headlines in different places. A different headline can also better target your promotion to different audiences. Compose a promotional headline that will resonate with your Twitter followers — and remember to leave enough character space to include your Twitter name when re-tweeted.

These niche networks are also great resources when it comes to generating concepts for the creation of content. If a topic is highly debated or discussed, it means that there is an appetite for quality content around or about that topic.

Sharing vs. Spamming

Keep in mind that you cannot expect to merely broadcast promotional content and have a successful response. In order to be successful in promoting your content on any community-driven channel you must be an active, participating member. You have to have street cred within the community in order to garner respect — otherwise you’re a spammer.

Participation is easily achieved on Twitter by following the 4-1-1 Rule — tweet 4 pieces of relevant original content from others and re-tweet 1 relevant tweet for every 1 self-promoting tweet. On LinkedIn, things are not much different. You need to be recognized in groups and discussions as a valuable contributor or else your promotional participation will be viewed as spam.

Takeaway

Interpersonal content promotion made use of your most immediate personal relationships, whether online or off. Narrowcast content promotion pushes your content to a significantly larger, but slightly less familiar audience through social networks. If you are legitimately an active participant within these networks, your content will be well received and your promotion successful.

Coming up

Next week we’ll get serious about attracting larger audiences by using broadcast content promotion techniques.

About the author

Brett Virmalo -

As a creative director at Tippingpoint Labs, Brett leads a team deploying ecommerce and content marketing solutions for global B2B and consumer clients.

Brett has worked with clients including PG&E, Kodak, American Express, TomTom, Putnam Investments, and most recently, Breville. He has been with Tippingpoint Labs since 2003 serving as a designer, developer, art director, and now creative director.