You will agree with me that the recent changes that happened to the search results pages of the biggest search engine – Google – have beclouded content organically. This effect is more on the competitive commercial searches. While this is the case, the paid search CPCs are at their peak in the more established markets.
One would therefore ask, “Why not post my content on social media?” Well, there is a hindrance down that route. While you may be banking on the possibility of getting your content shared among the many users of the various social media platforms, research has it otherwise. SEO Chicago points out that organic reach in social media is more or less impossibility. More than 50% of all content on the social media platforms get nil shares and those that get shared more than 1000 times are far much less.
As if the pinch is not painful enough, recently, one of the largest social media platforms, Facebook, announced that the chances of getting your content to the people not related to you got thinner! Furthermore, the typical internet marketing rate of conversion is less than one per cent.
The misconception people have that using the social media should be a piece of cake for them is because they do not have their facts straight. Many people think that content marketing includes the three generic steps of creating a new content, sharing your content on social networks, and getting customers buying your products already. The truth is, this almost never happens because the content usually goes nowhere plus the process of a consumer purchasing your stuff takes time.
- What is the remedy?
How then can you use the social media to increase sales with content? As a remedy, using the social media ads is an adequate and the most reliable way to promote content and convert visitors to potential customers who will be willing to share the content with many other users. The advantages do not end there, the part that you want to hear the most is that the ad budget is not scary big.
To accelerate the rate at which you get new visitors for your content, consider the following great tips to be used for Facebook and Twitter.
- Get higher Quality Score
Google uses the quality score to rank the quality and the relevance of the keywords you use and the PPC ads and consequently influence your cost per click. Facebook’s and Twitter’s version of the quality score are Relevancy Score and the Quality Adjusted Bid respectively. On Facebook, you get a Higher Relevancy Score when your post has higher engagement and will result into more impression share and lower cost per engagement.
On Twitter, many more factors are taken into consideration for you to earn a higher Quality Adjusted Bid. These are:
- Relevance – your tweet should relate to the interests of the users
- Resonance – consumers should engage in either retweeting, replying or favorite your tweets
- Recency – your tweets should be fresh and more recent to get higher priority.
With all these factors under check, you will get more ad impressions at lower costs.
As shown above, a high quality score comes a higher ad impression share at a lower cost per engagement while a low Quality score is undesirable because not only will it give you a low ad impression share, the cost per engagement will also be high. This is sufficient to explain that the Quality Score is a fundamental metric you will need to increase your post engagement rates both on Twitter and Facebook.
To best increase your post engagement rates; firstly, start by identifying your best posts, these are, the posts that perform better compared to the other posts, and the posts that did not perform well. Secondly, promote the posts that performed better. Exactly how do you distinguish the best performing posts from the underperforming posts? Carry out a test. After posting a lot of stuff on twitter, use the Twitter Analytics to see the post that got the most engagement.
Once that is done, post your best stuff organically from Twitter to other social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook. Repeat the process of identifying the posts that got the most engagement again. Once you have identified and isolated them, choose a plan to pay for the promotion of the best posts while making certain that you maximize the engagement rates.
- Use video ads
One brilliant method of getting your ad out is using videos. The good news is; at a minimal cost of $0.02, you can get thousands of video views. Not only is using video ads a cheap and smart way, it also gives the customers a lasting memory of you and your products. This way, the customers will buy more from you.
I addition, using video ad campaigns will boost your relevancy score by 2 points! To get the most out of your video ads, promote those which have done well in other platforms like YouTube, make sure it can be understood even without sound and aim at making the video memorable.
- Consider Custom Audiences
Posting your content and using the tailored audiences feature to promote your piece by targeting specific audiences that can influence views is a good idea. This could result in getting you a traffic of visitors as a result of influencers and even more platforms for advertising. This identity based marketing strategy is possible on Facebook under its custom audiences and on twitter’s tailored audiences.
- Use a variety of social Platforms
Promoting your content on many more social platforms is a diversification strategy that will result in massive traffic. The posts should be relevant to the right audience. Reposting the posts will also open up more opportunities and expose you to new audience. Such platforms include Reddit, Medium, Digg, and Hacker news.
- Promote SEO by optimizing engagement
The AI machine learning system that google is now using – RankBrain – is majorly concerned with user engagement metrics to rank the search result pages and provide relevant answers to questions raised by users. This implies that getting high organic CTRs and conversion rates will come with great rewards like increased clicks and conversions, and improved organic search rankings.
- Super Remarketing
This involves the perfect combination of various factor that aim at targeting a specific audience that meet certain specifications. These criteria include the people whose behavior and interests are actually in line with your stuff, they have recently been checking your posts and they can actually afford to buy your stuff. The result of this is increased sales and more income for you!
