Boosting Your Brand With Social Media
Building brand authority looks like more than just outlasting your competitors. It also takes more than merely publishing a website. While launching a high-quality site is certainly one of the first steps, there are many other means of achieving the goal of building your brand authority. After all, it would be too easy to hit “publish” and expect the consumers to come to you, right?
What building brand authority really takes is a consistent strategy and staying on top of trends in your industry niche. It means branching out across multiple content platforms to deliver your message, your product or your service to the masses.
No matter what type of content you produce (short-form, long-form, video, etc.), sharing it to a variety of content platforms will help you boost your brand credibility. Here I’ll dive into link sharing and content syndication and consider these two methods for building your brand authority across multiple content-sharing sites.
Sharing Links to Generate More Leads
So you and your team have generated amazing content. But how do you ensure your target audience or core demographic is actually seeing this awesome information? Arguably, the simplest way is by sharing links across different content platforms.
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are three content platforms that make this sharing easy. On each of these sites, brands can create a quick call to action post followed by a specific link. But before you jump in and start copy-and-pasting your text from one platform to the next, remember that audiences vary across platforms.
CTAs should be tailored to the particular site, as different audiences are logging onto these content platforms for different reasons. Twitter enthusiasts expect short, to-the-point copy, for instance, while LinkedIn and Facebook users are accustomed to longer posts.
Instagram is another content platform to take advantage of, particularly given that more than 83% of users have discovered either a new product or a new service on the site. In fact, over 67% of the 290 billion brand engagements on social media last year took place on Instagram.
However, sharing your links can be trickier on this social media platform. You’ll need to create a link in your bio, preferably with multiple links branching out to different parts of your site. This allows users who come across your brand to easily access the specific content they are looking for directly from Instagram.
Syndicating Content to Build Your Reputation
Let’s jump gears now to content syndication. In its simplest form, content syndication consists of republishing your blog or website content onto third-party platforms. These reposts link back to your original site and domain, thereby crediting you and your brand.
Medium and Substack are two of the most popular content platforms to leverage for content syndication. In fact, Medium is specifically designed for content syndication and was created with discovery in mind, as users come to the site to learn and expand their knowledge. As a result, it’s best practice to distribute long-form content on this channel rather than product- or service-focused content.
Bear in mind that you’ll want to generate as many views and “claps” as possible within the first hour of your post going live on Medium. This is your greatest opportunity for being featured in the Trends section on the site’s homepage.
Substack—an email newsletter platform for smaller publishers to make money from subscriptions—is one of the newer content syndication platforms. When you write content for Substack, readers must pay to access it. Substack subscribers are interested in very niche topics, which is why they may be willing to pay a premium for your newsletter. While creating a newsletter can be daunting, Substack makes it easy even for those who aren’t tech-savvy.
Link Sharing and Content Syndication: Better Together
Link sharing and content syndication are two solid marketing tactics to utilize when launching your brand or seeking to build its authority. Each of these tactics has its own benefits and drawbacks.
The main benefit of sharing links across content platforms is wider distribution of your content. However, it can take some trial and error to figure out what types of content perform best on each site. It also requires content calendar mapping to ensure you aren’t posting the same piece of content on all the sites at once. Users expect diversity in their feeds and don’t want to see the same content reposted again and again.
The benefits of content syndication are equally valuable. Syndication can help expose your brand to different target audiences, boost SEO efforts and increase your brand awareness and reputation. However, it does take more time, and it’s possible to make simple but harmful errors. Violating Google’s duplication policies, choosing the wrong syndication partners and generating bad leads are all syndication missteps that could hurt your brand.
What’s the bottom line? While link sharing and content syndication each have their strengths and weaknesses, you’ll likely want to combine your marketing tactics by using both. These two content distribution methods can give you and your brand a leg up when it comes to building your brand authority within your industry niche.
John Hall is the co-founder and president of Calendar, a scheduling and time management app. He’s also the strategic adviser for Relevance, a company that helps brands differentiate themselves and lead their industry online.You can book him as a keynote speaker here and you can check out his best-selling book “Top of Mind.” Sign up for Calendar here.
