Do you think of yourself as a content publisher?
It’s an amazing fact to think about, because to many of us who came of age before the advent of the commercialized Internet, being a “publisher” meant owning a large warehouse full of printing presses, ready to print the latest newspaper, magazine or book. If you’re a fan of Spider-Man, you may immediately think of J. Jonah Jameson, the gruff publisher working to smear Spidey in his Daily Bugle newspaper. However, being a publisher of content marketing in 2017 doesn’t require a newspaper, a corner office or a printing press – if you’ve established an online presence for your business and regularly publish content to a blog, social media or other online property you control, you’re a publisher!
You’ve Earned the Title!
Assigning a formal title to one of the more seemingly mundane tasks associated with marketing your business online may feel like an indulgence, but formalizing this task can help you realize the importance of taking your content marketing, your overall online presence and the marketing funnel you’ve established to convert social media followers into new and returning clients of your business.
As a publisher, it’s not just important to regularly push content to the online outlets you’ve already established – you also need to determine if you should expand your online presence to other social media networks. Expanding your online presence isn’t a given in every circumstance, as a larger online presence requires a larger commitment of time and resources, but we’ve identified two social media networks that the vast majority of businesses and organizations should be utilizing in 2017.
Instagram: Let Your Visual Content Shine!
Instagram is a photo-sharing service and social network centered around mobile images – in fact, if you don’t utilize a professional content-publishing platform, you can only upload content to Instagram through your mobile device. The service rose to fame in 2011 and 2012, with virtual photographic “filters” that allow users to instantly edit their updated photographs. After being acquired by Facebook and with a userbase of 700 million as of April 2017, Instagram has joined the core Facebook service and Twitter as an essential network for the vast majority of businesses and organizations.
Utilizing Instagram is free, and adding written content to the network in the form of photo captions is identical to adding written content to Facebook or Twitter, with similar use of hashtags. However, regularly updating Instagram and growing a base of followers on the service requires a steady stream of visual content, including photographs and infographs. Your content should include images of your products or, if applicable, images of your employees providing services to your clients. Most importantly of all, all of your brand content should follow your brand guidelines as closely as possible, and you should monitor your account in order to respond to comments left by your followers.
LinkedIn: It’s Time To Get Back to Business
It’s likely you’re more familiar with LinkedIn, as the network and service were first founded in 2002. Now a subsidiary of Microsoft, some only consider LinkedIn to be a recruitment and sales tool: an excellent source of resumes and sales leads, but a poor way to market your business. Nothing could be further from the truth!
Link The World
LinkedIn’s active users still number in the hundreds of millions, and the service is an excellent tool to market your business to other professionals and businesses and to an international audience. LinkedIn users expect content that’s posted to the service to be “business oriented,” which may exclude your more fanciful or entertaining content. Luckily, with an expanded word count and the ability to post images and text to the service, you can easily adapt your Facebook content to LinkedIn. In addition to functioning as a standard social network, LinkedIn allows users to join groups, which can represent exciting opportunities for you to network with other entrepreneurs and professionals and build your personal brand as a subject matter expert in your field or industry.