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Six Reasons Social Media is the Future of Content Marketing

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image of a smartphone featuring a popular social media app — content marketing
At least five days a week, your morning begins with the same incessant ring: “Wake up, you need to make money!” your alarm clock screams, dragging you away from the comforts of slumber. It’s time to start your day.
What do you do first? Brush your teeth? Take a shower? Throw on some clothes? Not even close.
If you’re like the other 79% of modern Americans, you check your phone before you even climb out of bed. That means you’ve probably blinked less than ten times before your eyes start feasting on the latest social media chatter.
Is your business’ content something they’re looking at?

Fishing for Engagement

The scope of today’s content distribution mainframe runs a little something like this:

  • Content is produced.
  • This content is hosted on its creator’s website.
  • Content is shared through various social media channels in hopes of creating buzz.
  • And then you wait.

If you’re lucky, your content will spark a conversation; it might even earn your business some new customers. If not, this next subhead’s for you…

Why Content Fails

Up until very recently, content demanded to be created and maintained on self-hosted websites, such as the one you’re reading this article on. Social platforms simply served as a medium to tell the world about new content on your website.
For the two thirds of Americans who use mobile devices, that means he/she must click on the web link embedded in your social media feed before being ripped away from his/her social media app and dropped into a web browsing app where he/she waits for your content to eventually load.
If you’re thinking that this sounds like a disheveled experience, you’re absolutely right. The arrant fragmentation between content and social media is counterintuitive at best.
The fact is that nearly half of internet users are willing to wait 2 seconds or less for your content to load before bowing out to the next piece of content. So if your website doesn’t load the content the user wants to see quickly enough, the likelihood of your content being consumed in this manner is reduced by up to 40%, therefore obliterating your conversion rate simply because your audience has to work too hard to see what you have to say.

A New Medium For Content Marketing

Fortunately, social media has a solution. Major platform contenders, such as Facebook and Google have designed streamlined ways to build, share and consume content without diverting users to a third party host, ultimately eliminating the “middle man” between content creation and distribution.

Begin Your Social Media Strategy Now

As your customers circulate around the web, each second to grab their attention is precious. Start developing your social media content marketing strategy now while keeping these six key benefits in mind:

  1. Improved User Experience: Users will not be diverted from social media to your website, therefore your content’s potential 40% bounce rate is virtually eliminated.
  2. Improved Engagement: Since content can now be built directly into social media platforms, users are more likely to share or comment on this content to their own feeds, sparking opportunities for engagement and growth.
  3. Reduced Server Maintenance: Long-form social media content can be hosted on the same server that contains your social posts, photos and videos. This means you will no longer have to take the time to maintain this content separately on your self-hosted server.
  4. Cost-effectiveness: Less data to maintain on your self-hosted server means less money you have to spend to run that server.
  5. Continuity: Content built within your social media platforms will be easier for you to distribute and measure with built-in analytics.
  6. Prevalence: Long-form social media brings content creation to the masses. As a tool designed to be used by anyone, your business should pursue this resource as early as possible.

Join the Social Media Content Marketing Phenomenon

As a worldwide phenomenon, social media is potentially one of the most exciting aspects of modern communication. When looking at the scope of the platform and its future, Twitter’s founder and St. Louis native, Jack Dorsey, said it best: “It’s different things to different people at different times and we need to embrace that.”
The same can be said for content marketing: social media is continuously changing to meet society’s needs and desires. As a result, content marketers have an obligation to plug into these shifting trends and lead the charge into the new age of social content.

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