June 1, 2011
Social media likes to give and take with both hands. It gives you innumerable ways of getting your company’s voice out to your target market, managing your reputation and adding value to your business. And then it takes. It takes all the content you can possibly feed it and it always asks for more.
Quality content, as Jason Miller at Social Media Examiner recently wrote, is the “fuel for your social media rocket ship”. So if you need a constant stream of content filling your social platforms, where exactly do you get the constant stream of ideas?
Miller provides a series of really insightful tips, including the use of RSS feeds, identifying blogs which are relevant to your business and subscribing to their feeds for inspiration. He also suggests jumping into relevant LinkedIn groups to see what people are discussing; as well as searching forums, crowdsourcing topics that your audience would actually like to read about by posting up a tweet or FB post and even listening to industry audio books when you’re on the go.
With the Google Panda update which came in to play in February – followed by further changes in April – ‘quality’ content is more important than ever; and social media has become an even more valuable means of sharing content and securing search visibility.
Content isn’t really a conundrum. All it takes is a clear strategy and a pre-planned calendar. With these in place, you always know where your next content is coming from and you ensure your website content is aligned with and pushed out via your social media platforms to increase that all important Google visibility.