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and a small starting point, social media can be the vital cog for gaining both reach and engagement.

Useful Tools

While you can easily distribute links and talk to audiences via the social platforms, the most cost effective way of managing social media distribution is to use a tool. Hootsuite and Tweetdeck are similar tools that can be used for the management of multiple social media accounts. Hootsuite has the most features, but does comes a small subscription cost.

The two key features of these tools are:

þþ Multiple Feed Viewing – You can see 4-6 ‘streams’ or social media feeds on one screen using these apps. This is particularly useful when you have placed influencers in particular lists, or want to engage with more than one social network at once. Many

people also recommend engag.io for aggregating all of your possible social conversations in one place.

þþ Multiple Account Publishing – If you run more than one social media account, then it can be time consuming to have to login into the various social networks to update each one in turn. As the diagram below shows, you can publish from several accounts at once using Hootsuite:

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These tools also have other useful features built in, such as post scheduling, moderation and link tracking. In simple terms, they will speed up the management of multiple social media accounts.

Social Media Building using all Traffic Sources

When most people think of traffic built from social media, they will normally see it as a referral source. However, it is possible to use social media to build all traffic sources, including direct and organic search traffic. Here’s how:

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þþ You have a social media account, for which you grow following via advertising, competitions and engagement.

þþ You then have a larger social media account (probably 10,000+ Followers/Likes) – this means you can meaningfully interact with followers/fans to gain useful information, such as through polling. With this in mind, you can capture this data and publish it on a destination site.

þþ You then continue to grow it to an even larger social media account (50,000+ Followers/

Likes). From here, you can send significant referral traffic to a destination traffic. But you will also probably be sending more direct traffic to your website. Finally, you can leverage this new found social media equity by teaming up with third parties. From your account, send them bursts of traffic via link sharing in exchange for them building links to your site.

Bearing this in mind, your social profiles can be the essential levers in your outreach.

Managing Influencer Contributions

When influencers contribute to your content, they have a natural propensity to share and promote it. In Defining an Editorial plan, we outlined the importance of curation in a content strategy, and getting influential people to contribute to your content is an essential part of this curation.

Guest Posting

In B2B digital marketing content, it is common to have the majority of the publishing schedule of blogs and websites fulfilled by expert contributors. Indeed, blogs such as Smart Insights,

State of Search or SeoMoz all thrive because of these contributions. But how do these blogs gain the status of being expert hubs?

The crucial thing in gaining influencer contributions is to start small. You’re unlikely to get major influencers publishing on your site without a solid reputation, so approaching them may be initially quite frustrating. However, by focusing on the quality of your own quality of content

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to start with, and then occasionally mixing in expert contributors who do not yet have very high influence, you will find that slowly and surely, your website’s reputation will grow as a hub.

Through your influencer research, you should have an idea of people who are active in the community, but might not be seen as the top influencers. Give these people an opportunity to have a voice on your website, and it’s possible they’ll be happy to contribute. After all, guest posting is a good way to build social media followings and improving their own SEO through linking back to their company website.

Initially, it’s worth putting your guest posts into your Editorial Calendar, so you can keep a clear record of who’s publishing when, and how this fits in with your other publishing.

Once you find there are very regular contributions, or that you don’t have to ask to gain new quality contributors, you may feel that you know longer need to schedule the posting. Over time, more people will be made aware that they can contribute, and you may want to create a process where they can simply login and contribute when they feel like.

Of course, when you have third parties publishing on your website, then it’s important to approve and edit what they’re saying (which is easily done on most blogging platforms) and also make them aware of the house rules. Send them the Editorial Style Guide. However, note that they shouldn’t have to stringently follow your set message architecture and tone of voice – they are third party contributors, and it’s important to make you website audience aware of that with a simple disclaimer.

Expert Roundups

If you’re struggling to get full guest posts from influential people or expert contributors, then a roundup approach can often be useful in grabbing sound bites – it takes less time to contribute, and you can potentially get more contributors – which is likely to lead to more sharing and linking!

Say there is a critical change on the horizon in your industry, such as a new piece of legislation or new technological shift. You could ask various members of your influencer list of their opinion, then curate all of these opinions into one article.

Of course, you could simply interview one person about their role as well – this can be particularly effective at conferences and events in your sector, where you may be able to get face time with a number of people.

Curated News

A system similar to expert roundups is to create curated news – that is a roundup of news with references and opinion from elsewhere. This format is increasing in popularity as digital media continues to fragment, meaning it can be difficult to find the best news and sources unless you’re an industry insider.

With curated news, you reference news published by your partners, opinions stated by experts or potentially other industry news. It’s recommended that you right this in a prose style, referencing and linking to the right sources in your copy. Be sure to let your partners know that you have included them.

Harnessing Social Media

A final method of curating contributions for a destination website is through harnessing a social media presence or conversation.

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The simplest method of embedding social media conversations or what a particular influencers is saying onto your site is by using a widget such as Storify or Twitter Widgets. This can be particularly useful if you’re having a conversation around a particular hashtag. One of the best examples of this can be seen with NME.com’s the Song that changed my life – which got such a good response on Twitter they also published it as a regular series on their website, and even used a variation on their magazine cover:

NME.com Case Study

NME.com is one of the best examples of how to interweave social media and content strategy. Social media now drives 30% of a 7m strong online audience.

Editor Luke Lewis (now of Buzzfeed UK) explained this integration at news : rewired:

“What we use it for is not just to drive traffic; we like to use it to give our users a space to just express themselves and have fun. I’m kind of agnostic really whether or not this interaction happens on NME.com or Facebook, as long as they’re conversing with us and not someone else – I think that’s the important thing.”

An example he used was to ask the Facebook audience to “Describe Your Sex Life with a Song Title” – a fairly common forum meme reused specifically for NME’s audience that garnered a significant response.

Lewis also has a very large Facebook subscriber base, which he regularly poses questions on pieces the website is planning:

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NME and Lewis’ social presence allows them to tap into their audience to crowd source content and help them develop ideas. The team put out the call to find the best band tattoos, using twitter hashtags and Facebook comments, and culminated with My Favourite Tattoo

– Bands and Readers Reveal All – an article that was shared over 4,000 times. Evidently, readers enjoy being part of the content, and are happy to share what they’ve been involved with.

Further examples of this interplay can be seen at Luke Lewis’s Journalism.co.uk article:

Managing Content Marketing

Seven ways NME uses social media to ‘harvest ideas’ from its audience.

Conclusion and Resources

By following the processes mentioned in this guide, you should be able to shape a robust plan for an effective content marketing strategy. Along with the processes, there are a number of tools, blog posts and books cited as sources in this guide which we have collated here for ease of access.

Please let us know how you find this guide.

Useful Tools

Any tools marked with an * will incur a subscription charge to use their full range of features.

Audience Research

rr Followerwonk* – An extremely useful tool for finding influencers and monitoring your own followers / who you follow on Twitter.

rr Facebook Insights – Facebook’s analytics packages tells you a lot about your audience, and you content performance on the world’s largest social network.

rr Polldaddy* – An excellent set of tools for polling, surveying and quizzing your audience, all of which can be used in your audience research. It has particularly strong integration with Wordpress

rr Google Forms – An application that allows you to build embeddable forms.

rr Klout – Useful for quickly finding influential people on social media for particular keywords.

Keyword Analysis

rr Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool – An important tool for finding long lists of keywords and their monthly search volumes.

rr Mergewords – Allows you to merge keywords using up to three terms and create new combinations automatically.

rr Ubersuggest – This is an extended version of Google Suggest (the related terms that appear when you type into the Google search box). When you search for a keyword it will add a suffix for all letters in the alphabet and give you related terms.

rr Soovle – A search suggestion box that informs you of related search patterns from eleven key search sources.

Content Auditing

rr SeoMoz Campaign Tool* – A comprehensive content marketing tool. It has a wide range of features, including website crawling, keyword tracking, Google Analytics and social data integration.

rr Xenu Link Sleuth – Created to help webmasters find broken links, you can also use it to check URLs. You can send it into your website upon download.

rr Screaming Frog* – Similar to Xenu, but with some extra features (such as onpage information like <h1> and <h2> tags). It’s free up to 500 URIs.

rr Opensiteexplorer.org* – The search engine for links. With this you can check the backlink

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profile of any website, with a range of usable filters.

Dashboarding

rr Leftronic* and Geckoboard* – Live dashboarding solutions that allow you to pull data from multiple sources (website analytics, social, sales and more) and have it visualised live in one place.

rr Netvibes or Google Reader – RSS readers that allow you to put all your subscribed content feeds in one place.

rr Trendsmap – A map of Twitter trends, which shows the location of the conversation on a map.

Analytics

rr Google Analytics – A free but powerful website analytics solution.

rr Parse.ly Dash – A predictive analytics tool that crawls millions of web pages and can suggest trending topics, as well as monitor real time content performance and author statistics.

rr Chartbeat – a powerful real time analytics dashboard, from which you can quickly gather how your content is performing and where people are coming from.

Referenced Books

The below books have been referenced in this guide or have otherwise informed the content. You’re likely to know about it, but don’t miss the Smart Insights 7 Steps guide to Developing a Content Marketing Strategy.

rr Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson & Melissa Rach (2009)

rr Content Marketing: Think Like a Publisher – How to Use Content to Market Online and in Social Media, Rebecca Leib (2011)

rr Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content, Colleen Jones (2010)

rr Content Strategy at Work: Real-world Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project, Margot Bloomstein (2011)

rr The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing and Creating Content for the Web, various authors (2010)

rr The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr & E.B. White (4th ed. 1999)

rr Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs, Brian Halligan & Darmesh Shah (2009)

rr Managing Content Marketing: the Real World Guide for Creating Passionate Subscribers to Your Brand, Robert Rose & Joe Pulizzi (2009)

rr Tested Advertising Methods, John Caples revised by Frederick Hahn (5th ed. 1998) rr A Technique for Producing Ideas, James Young (2003 edition)

rr Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters, Richard Rumelt (2011) rr Building Strong Brands, David Aaker (2010 edition)

rr Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, Josh Bernoff & Charlene Li (2008)

rr Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization,

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Oliver Blanchard (2011)

rr Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Take Hold and Others Come Unstuck, Chip & Dan Heath (2008)

rr Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories, Donna Spencer (2009) rr The Art of SEO, Various Authors (2009)

Referenced Blog Posts

rr SeoMoz - Beginner’s Guide to SEO: Keyword Research rr John Doherty – Minimum Viable Keyword Research

rr Distilled - Determining Site Architecture from Keyword Research rr Robin Sloan – Stock and Flow

rr Neil Perkin – The 70, 20, 10 Model

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