5 Smart Ways to Increase the Reach of Your Content
On Twitter, your content has an average half-life of under three hours. On Facebook, the visibility that you receive in the first five hours post-publishing is 75% of what you can expect to get in total. That is a lot of content competing for viewers’ attention. To get your content noticed, just publishing isn’t enough. You need a smart content distribution strategy in place.
Here are five ways to power-pack your content distribution strategy to get high visibility and engagement:
- Use content distribution platforms
- Re-purpose content like your life depends on it
- Push content through employee networks
- Get influencers involved
- Use communities to get extended reach for your content
1. Use content distribution platforms
You spend hours promoting your content on your social media pages and newsletters. While it is great to nurture existing relationships, those tactics don’t really focus on driving “new” traffic back to your website. For new traffic, you have to tap into other relevant and powerful external networks.
There are several content distribution platforms that you can work with to reach these external networks. Here are some good options.
You can submit your content on Outbrain to have it placed on premium websites like CNN. Compared to other platforms of this type, Outbrain has a lower cost per click and better targeting. It also has a high quality cut-off, which also works in your favor because you will be in good content company.
Popular social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram
Distributing content through social media is a great way to boost shares and increase visibility. This can be achieved on almost all social media networks. According to a survey conducted by Nanigans, a Facebook marketing partner and a member of the Instagram marketing program, Facebook offered an average CPC of $0.64 late 2015, at an average 0.9% CTR. The cost may have fluctuated owing to the increase in demand for Facebook ads. The same survey had Instagram at $0.65 CPC and 0.9% CTR. Even though LinkedIn ads cost significantly more at $5.74 (as recorded by HubSpot), HubSpot’s clients have seen about 9% clicks convert.
It is also necessary to consider which platform most of your target audience is present on. Facebook has the largest number of monthly active users and a lot of useful data to target from them. However, if you’re a B2B marketer, boosting your content on LinkedIn may make more sense because you can target people by company and job title, which you can’t do on Facebook. If you’re looking for a non-intrusive type of social media ad, Twitter’s “in-feed” ad is a good option because it blends in with the surrounding content without screaming promotion.
If you have excellent visual content and your audience is present on Instagram, there’s no better choice because 65% of the most popular posts on Instagram are brand posts (as recorded by L2, a reputed business intelligence service). Clearly, brand posts are being received well on Instagram.
Social influencer content promotion networks like Klout, DrumUp, and Viral Content Buzz
There are several platforms which allow you to connect with influencers to boost shares. Let us discuss three interesting ones that can help you increase content visibility. On Klout, you can prompt social media influencers to share your content in exchange for free subscriptions and discounts. The influencers are grouped by their areas of influence, making your content distribution through them precise and effective.
You can promote your content on DrumUp for it to appear as a recommendation to other users. DrumUp has an intelligent algorithm that crawls through sites and provides users with suggestions relevant to the keywords that they set. Their sponsored posts are carefully placed to show up on just the right influencers’ feeds, increasing the likelihood of it being shared.
On Viral Content Bee, you can have your content amplified on this platform in exchange for sharing other users’ content. Essentially, you get a pick of articles to share from, so you’re also getting content recommendations while having your content shared.
2. Re-purpose content like your life depends on it
Creating great content is a time-consuming task, but an inevitable one. Re-purposing content is one way to justify the effort that you have put into creating it. You could recycle one piece of content in several ways. Here are six super effective ways of doing it to expand your reach.
Turn your blog post into an infographic and distribute it
You can convert highlights of your blog post into an information-packed infographic using a tool like Piktochart or Visual.ly. Distribute the infographic that you create on stock image sites like Flickr and Pexels, SlideShare and infographic directories. Blogging Wizard’s Adam Connell used this tactic on a popular blog post of his, and the infographic version received over 2000 shares and 22,000 site visits.
Convert your blog post into a SlideShare and embed it
You can use Google Slides to do this. It lets you add graphs easily to increase content quality. Embed the SlideShare that you create on your social media and blog posts where relevant.
Turn your blog post into a podcast and upload it on audio content sites
You can record interviews on Skype and use Audacity or GarageBand to record other content. Once you have your podcast, you can upload it on iTunes, Stitcher, Miro, and SoundCloud to increase your reach.
Convert your guides into downloadable PDFs and offer them on your website
Any PDF converter available online can help you do this. Request an email address in exchange for your website offering and use that list of emails to distribute more of your content.
Turn interesting snippets of your content into social media posts
You may have awesome studies, graphs, or graphics on your blog post. Take screenshots of them and use them as social media posts.
Convert your instructional content into video tutorials
Once you have converted your content into video tutorials, upload them on YouTube, Vimeo, and the regular social media sites (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).
3. Push content through employee networks
There are over 40 reasons why employees should be a part of your content marketing plan. A properly executed employee advocacy program not only increases your visibility, but also improves your engagement and conversion rates.
Here’s how you can build a powerful content distribution plan involving your employees.
Make sharing an easy affair by using technology to connect employees with your brand’s content
Choose a platform that allows direct sharing so your employees don’t have to login to their social media profiles each time they want to share. You can also add share plugins on your blog and in your internal newsletters and emails to make sharing effortless for your employees.
Motivate employees to write about your brand with incentives and proper rewards
You can involve executive level employees in blogging by giving them rough drafts to work with so they can add personality to it and post it out. For the rest of your employees, you can turn sharing into a monthly contest with exciting rewards.
Allow employees to suggest posts to be shared
Choose a platform that allows employees to suggest posts for their colleagues to share. This makes employees more enthusiastic and that results in more visibility for your brand.
4. Get influencers involved
Influencers aren’t only the people with large social media followings. Anyone who can drive meaningful impact for your brand can be an influencer. Do your research when identifying your influencers, and remember that size of following doesn’t matter but the influencer’s ability to drive your intended action does. Here are four ways to get influencers involved in content distribution.
Create content that authors would want to link-out to
Brian Dean from Backlinko has an interesting case-study that explains this well. Instead of creating simple tips posts that only drive shares, you can create in-depth and comprehensive guides that people want to link-out to. This would not only ensure more shares, but also real traffic from other websites.
Conduct an interview series and ask them for quotes
Ask interesting questions that are in their area of expertise. When you promote your interview series posts, @ mention participating influencers.
Feature influencers/link-out to their work
When you feature someone on your blog or link-out to an article of theirs, write to them and let them know. This activity is a great way to build relationships and drive more shares for your content.
Use influencer outreach platforms to connect with relevant influencers who want to share
There are quite a few influencer marketing platforms that connect you with influencers who can share your content. You could check out Traackr or InstaBrand to get a sense of how they work.
5. Use communities to get extended reach for your content
According to social scientists, communities are where people discuss important things and seek help and advice when they need it. Being present on communities can make you that person, giving your brand a huge advantage. However, you can just jump in and share, communities need nurturing to give you any real traction. Identify the right communities, participate in discussions and add value.
Here’s things to keep in mind when distributing content in communities.
Follow community rules
On Google Plus, LinkedIn and Reddit, most communities have a set of rules to follow. Make sure that you respect them. For instance, some subReddits need you to post the entire content of your share and not the link.
Don’t be overtly promotional
For Reddit and most other communities, it is good to set time apart to participate on a regular basis, by sharing non-promotional and useful content before you move on to sharing your brand’s content.
Write custom and value-adding descriptions
Try and add value in your community post itself instead of just sharing links. A personalized one-liner or interesting fact about the post you’re sharing is more likely to boost your shares than plain link sharing.
Make you shares stand out
You can use fun and offbeat images and great writing to make your post stand out, like Oliver Emberton did.
He rose to fame because of his Quora post which was the most viewed post back then, with 4.93 million views to be exact. A lot of people participate on Quora, but few see results like these. You can watch how he did it on this video.
Effective content distribution is all about identifying potential channels and making the most of those that are at your disposal. Once you have a smart content distribution plan in place, you won’t have to work very hard at getting your content out to all the right people.
