Content Marketing – Leveraging Social Media to Promote Your Content

These days you can’t build a strong personal brand without a web presence. As professionals and small business owners, whatever our field, we need to become publishers, and use tools like blogs and social media profiles to publish and share information.

The most important element of our web presence is a blog, followed by our profiles in the main social media networks (for me, those are LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook).

We can also set up an account with a simple blogging platform like
Tumblr to share shorter and lighter posts. Finally, we can put it all together by creating a simple personal page where we can introduce ourselves and link to our blog and social media profiles.

All the different elements of your web presence feed from each other, which means that you can leverage your content in many different ways. For example, you could:

• Craft your elevator pitch and use it in your About Us page, or as your LinkedIn summary.
• Take a Twitter post and expand the idea into a full-blown blog post.
• Take the pictures you use on your blog posts, and use them in presentations you can then load to Slideshare.
• Bundle several blog posts into a PDF eBook that you can offer for download on your site or publish it on Scribd or Slideshare.
• Take a good picture of yourself and crop it in several different sizes to create avatars for your different social media profiles.
• Slightly modify blog posts to turn them into articles you can upload to article clearinghouses (you can then use your elevator pitch as your bio at the bottom of your article, adding a link to your website).
• Set your Facebook profile so that you can autopost content from your blog or other social media sites.
• Summarize the main takeaways of your blog posts in less than 140 characters and publish them as Twitter posts. Then, use those tweets as slide titles or takeaways in your presentations.
• Film yourself reading your blog posts aloud to turn them into video clips and upload them to YouTube.
• Gather all your Twitter posts for a week and bundle them to create blog posts.
• Write book reviews on Amazon and use them as blog posts.
• Aggregate your content from different social media sites by auto-posting it on platforms like Tumblr.
• The possibilities are endless and limited only by our imagination. By leveraging our content and establishing a strong personal presence online, our chances of having our sites and social media profiles appear in the first page when somebody Google’s our name will be greatly increased.

This post was inspired by the Fast Company series 30-Second MBA.  By harvesting 30-second clips from their archive of interviews with top business leaders and organizing them around relevant topics, Fast Company has created an exciting new product, generating buzz and expanding their online footprint.