Growing your Social Media Presence as a Content Creator

Disclaimer: This blog post is focused on the reasons why Cloud Campaign is a good fit for content creators.

The Unique Advantage of Content Creators

Content creators (bloggers, podcasters, photographers, etc...) have a unique advantage when it comes to social media - amazing content.  For fairly obvious reasons, audiences respond much better to thoughtful, curated content than ads.As more companies are taking to social media, it's becoming flooded with sales pitches and value propositions making readers skeptical.  The best way to gain a reader's trust is by providing value with no ask in return.  The 'no ask in return' part is important.  People are much more likely to share your content if they know their friends won't be bombarded with ads or popups as soon as they click on the link.

Providing Value

So how do you provide value?  It's simple - you teach, give, or entertain.  As a content creator, this is probably already your main focus so I won't go into great detail, but readers like to have some takeaway from the time they invested in interacting with your content even if the takeaway is just a smile on their face.I was on a call with Jane Hamilton, marketing manager at Mint (branch of Intuit), earlier this week and she was sharing with me how they grew their social media engagement by 150% and subsequently increased blog traffic.  I don't want to undermine their multifaceted strategy by boiling it down into only one key takeaway, because there were many great changes that Jane and her team initiated that lead to this great feat.  But, the overarching theme was to provide value.  One example of this is posting a lesser-known finance term with its definition; this provides value by teaching.  I think the edgy name for the campaign helped a bit too.

Social Media Strategy

Alright, you have the great content, so now what's your social media strategy?  Broadcast the content the day you create it and start working on the next post?  Probably not a good idea.  The number is constantly changing, as sorting algorithms change, but as a general rule of thumb about only 5% of your followers will ever see your organic post across networks (MarketingLand, '14).The trick is to recycle your evergreen content.  Evergreen meaning the content is relevant more or less indefinitely.  I know what you're thinking, "I've heard this before; there are already n tools that do this like, x, y, and z."  Partially true.  Cloud Campaign has some unique features built specifically for evergreen content that save you from spamming your audience.

‍1.  Multiple Captions Specify up to 10 captions.  Each time your content is posted, it will be posted with a new caption so it looks fresh and engaging each time.  Here's an example supplied to Indie Hackers by Annette Wong.

2.  Dynamic Scheduling Instead of just having a queue and posting on some static schedule, Cloud Campaign uses dynamic intervals to appropriately space your content out.  Some other SMM tools will just continuously repost your same content every 2 days if that's the only item in your queue.  CC intelligently spaces out your content as to not spam your audience.

3.  Detailed Analytics It's important to focus on the metrics that matter when gauging the success of a social media campaign. Add hashtags or category tags to your evergreen content to easily compare performance like "#motivationmonday" or "Thought Leadership" to other types of content you've posted.

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Still Not Convinced?

Cloud Campaign still offers all of the other functionality you've come to expect, whether that's just posting at a specific time or setting up a weekly schedule.  The tool also supports event-driven marketing.  You can trigger posts on trends, weather, and more.

I'm In, Sign Me Up!