One of the main challenges for business owners who want to create and retain a good presence on social media is finding the time and, more importantly, the resources to constantly release a new piece of content every X days.
Actually, Gartner’s Digital Marketing Spending Survey tells us that on average, around 21 percent of digital marketing budgets are spent on content creation and social marketing.
What this means is that every month, marketers need to find quite a lot of money to invest in content, otherwise they won’t have anything to share with their followers and fans. So what can we do to make this easier?
Here’s one of the possibilities – a way to reduce your spending and, at the same time, grow your social media engagement.
Recycling Your Existing Content
One of the unfortunate realities of publishing content on the web is that it has a rather short lifespan. After one or two weeks of glory, it often gets lost somewhere in the archives of your site, to be forgotten forever.
Because of this, you’re forced to bring out a new article or infographic every week or so, just to be able to populate your social media channels with something. This can cost a lot of money. But there is another method.
The way you can battle your growing content spending is by reusing some of your best content and promoting it through social and email marketing at the same time. That’s the one-sentence explanation, and now let’s get into the details.
Just one note before we get started. The method presented here will only work if the content you’re creating has an evergreen nature. This means that it can’t be time-dependent or based on news stories of any sort. In other words, it needs to be timeless for the most part.
Also, before you follow the steps, make sure you have registered a domain name that is easy to remember and brand because this process is the most effective for branding purposes.
Step #1: Picking What to Promote
I’m guessing you probably don’t have a lot of time to go back to your past content, browse through the archives, and then share something with your followers manually. A lot better way is to introduce a solution that can handle this on autopilot.
Therefore, if you’re running your site on WordPress, you can make your social media work much easier by using the right plugins.
The first one I’d like to share with you is called Revive Old Post (formerly called Tweet Old Post and reviewed on this site).
Just like the name suggests, it helps you shed some new light on your past content. The setup is quite simple – you only need to authorize it with your social media platforms – and right after that, the plugin will start browsing your archives, picking individual posts, adding hashtags to them, putting the links through Bitly (for additional tracking), and then finally sharing them on your social profiles (all on autopilot).
If you set the plugin to do this often enough, you will effectively introduce your new followers to the content that they probably haven’t seen before.
This could be a huge time-saver for you, especially considering the fact that, on average 43 percent of small business owners spend six or more hours per week on social media.
But that’s just the beginning …
Step #2: Tracking What’s Popular
The next step is to keep your finger on the pulse and pay attention to what content of yours is getting popular on social media.
For this, you can use the Social Metrics Tracker plugin. It gives you a really clear dashboard with your most popular posts at the top. The overview features the number of total shares, as well as individual scores for each social media platform.
Now, what we’re going to do here is follow the idea that it’s a lot easier to take something that’s already popular and make it even more popular than it is to make something popular from the ground up.
So using Social Metrics Tracker, you’re going to pick a handful of your most popular posts, and then reintroduce your visitors to them through email marketing (the next step).
What’s the trick here? Since you are using both Revive Old Post and Social Metrics Tracker, you’re not only picking the all-time most popular articles, but you’re also giving your whole archive a chance due to the fact that Revive Old Post picks what to share on a random basis. So over time, with past articles resurfacing every day, and new content being introduced as well, you should get a reliable list of your best content.
Step #3: Reinforcing Your Most Popular Content via Email Marketing
The last step in this method is to take your popular content and share it with your email subscribers. But hold on. I don’t want you to just start sending emails every week saying something like, “Hey, look at this!”
There’s a better way.
And it involves autoresponders.
In short, autoresponders allow you to set specific intervals at which certain email messages will go out to your subscribers automatically.
The fact is that every subscriber is most responsive to your messages during the initial days of being subscribed. That’s why we need to capitalize on this short window of opportunity with autoresponders.
Therefore, take your most popular social media content and put it into an autoresponder sequence to be sent out 1-3 days after the person has subscribed. However, as I said, this is not about sending just the link on its own. An autoresponder message looks just like any other newsletter message, so it needs additional text and an engaging story to go along with it.
Nevertheless, the purpose here is to invite the subscriber to that specific piece of popular content and preferably ask them to share it.
The explanation why this is very likely to work is simple. After all, you are sharing some of your most popular content – content that other visitors have already found useful – so there’s a very good chance that this new subscriber will find it useful too.
Now, about the technical stuff.
There are many email newsletter tools out there, but unfortunately, close to none of them offer any autoresponder functionality for free (even my current provider, MailChimp, does not offer auto-responders in their free package). In fact, the only solution I could find, and one I’m quite impressed with, is SendinBlue. As part of their free plan, you are allowed to send 9,000 emails a month, which should be enough to get you started.
The fact that you can take advantage of autoresponders for free means that we’ve secured the last piece of the puzzle and managed to implement this whole strategy for exactly $0.
Of course, scaling up over time will require some investments, but that’s a good problem to have.
What do you think? Is this something you are already doing? If not, are you going to try it out?
