By Mikela Dennison, Senior Account Director at The Clarity Business
Everyone likes to work smarter, not harder - and sharing your business content is no exception. Whether it's a blog post, presentation, report, survey, white paper or infographic, you should always aim to use your content in at least four ways, for maximum reach and effect.
And the good news is, it's not as complex as it sounds!
We encourage our clients to maximise their content and share it across multiple platforms to get the biggest impact for the time or resource put in. Here are some of our top tips for how to make one piece of content go the distance: Write with sharing in mind
Everyone likes to work smarter, not harder - and sharing your business content is no exception. Whether it's a blog post, presentation, report, survey, white paper or infographic, you should always aim to use your content in at least four ways, for maximum reach and effect.
And the good news is, it's not as complex as it sounds!
We encourage our clients to maximise their content and share it across multiple platforms to get the biggest impact for the time or resource put in. Here are some of our top tips for how to make one piece of content go the distance: Write with sharing in mind
- Gone are the days of long and wordy documents or online articles: think short and sweet
- Consider how easy your content is to tweet, to start a discussion on a LinkedIn group, to share as a post on Facebook, or to be a 'pin' on Pinterest
- Use short and catchy headlines to break up your text and serve as bite sized chunks of easy to share information
- Use statistics and facts that your reader will find interesting and easy to relate to others - for example, did you know a new blog is created every half second? *Fun fact*
- Don't be afraid of hyperlinks: you can create a richer experience for your reader if you link to other material (yours or others) and it shows you've done your research
- Not all posts will be suitable for LinkedIn, just like not all articles will fit into 140 characters on Twitter: think about the channel and tailor your content for the key platforms you use
- Make sure you use engaging visuals to draw your reader in, to illustrate your point, and to encourage sharing on image-oriented platforms like Pinterest, Facebook and Google+
- Always make sure your content points back to your website and directs traffic to your business
- Using email campaigns to send out interesting and original content to your customers, clients, staff and stakeholders is an ideal way to keep them involved with your business and to demonstrate you are part of their world
- Include your content in any newsletters or bulletins you send out to your audience and try to utilise the data you can access to see when your content is being opened, what people are sharing and where your traffic is coming from - data can be your biggest friend, so play nice and make the most of it
- If you don't have a e-newsletter set up, think about doing a simple hard copy you could send to clients and prospects with a personal note, or even just send an email to key people with the content included and a short message explaining why it might be useful for them to read
- It's about being simple and smart for you: don't be afraid to schedule your posts to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn via tools like Hootsuite (just make sure you do it properly and be responsive to any changes like a crisis or tragedy)
- Rest easy knowing that you have pointed people to your website or blog throughout the week, without you doing it every day when you are busy with meetings and closing deals
- It's always useful to take your content offline: seek out opportunities to present your content and engage with your audience IRL
- Turn presentations into blogs, and turn blogs into tweets or LinkedIn discussions (and vice versa)
- A blog, report, survey or online article can easily be printed out for a simple and effective leave behind