Rocking Your ROI

Rocking Your ROI

FACT: According to GlobalWebIndex.net, the amount of time people spend on social media each day has been steadily increasing over time. In 2013, people spent about 96 minutes on social media each day. By 2014, that number was 100 minutes. By 2015, the amount of time people spent on social media had grown to 109 minutes per day.

Social media is like quick sand – it’s pretty easy to get stuck and then get pulled under. Those “few minutes” you decide to spend on social media quickly turn into hours.

That’s great as far as your prospects and customers go. You want them to spend a lot of time on social media, which makes it more likely that they’ll see your content.

However, the key to your social media success is to make sure you’re not spending hours upon hours every day implementing your social media strategy. You need to maximize your ROI. And that’s what this chapter is about.

Here are the three areas we’ll cover:

• Maximizing Your Content Strategy
• Maximizing Your Exposure
• Maximizing Your Results

Let’s take a closer look…

Maximizing Your Content Strategy

Your entire social media strategy hinges on your ability to create shareable content. Over the long-term, this takes time to create all of this content. That’s why you’ll want to use these tips, tricks and strategies for saving yourself time and money as you roll out new content…

Save Time Posting Content

When you post something in one place, you don’t need to manually post this content elsewhere or announce it. That’s because there are automation tools that can help you with these tasks. (See the Recommended Resources section later in this book for specific tools.)

For example:

• You can use tools that automatically update your social media accounts whenever you post to your blog.

• You can use tools that post to multiple social media accounts at once.

These tools can save you anywhere from several minutes to several hours each week. Worth it? You bet it is.

Next up…

Repurpose Existing Content

This is a big one that will save you a lot of time, and get you maximum exposure for everything you create. The idea is to simply repurpose and recycle your existing content. In other words, reuse it so that you don’t have to start from scratch each time you sit down to create a piece of content.

The good news is that there are a lot of ways to do this. You can even use multiple methods to really maximize the use you get out of each piece of content.

So, this is a simple two-step method:

Step 1: Find suitable content

Step 2: Repurpose this content.

Let’s take a look at each step more closely…

Step 1: Find Suitable Content

The key to this step is to repurpose some of your best and most popular content.

You see, some folks look at their content that’s not doing well, and they decide to try to get more mileage out of it. But if the content didn’t perform well the first time, it’s probably going to bomb the second time you use it too.

That’s like taking the milk out of the fridge, smelling the stench of rotten milk, and then putting it back in the fridge. Spoiler alert: it’s not going to improve with time!

There are exceptions to that rule, of course. But if you want to make the most of your content, then start by recycling content that’s already proven to be popular. Remember, getting traction on social media depends on your content getting likes, comments, shares and other interaction. So you need to be rolling out content that you’re certain will do well.

Here’s where to find it…

Search Your Blog

Check your blog archives for popular content. Generally, this is content that possesses one or more of these characteristics:

• It gets a lot of traffic. This could be traffic from the search engines or traffic from backlinks (see below).

• It generated a lot of discussion. Relatively speaking, which posts generated a lot of comments from multiple people? These are potential posts you’ll want to repurpose.

• It enjoys a lot of backlinks. In other words, other people like the content so much that they shared it on their blogs, on social media, and elsewhere.

Next up…

Look for Popular Social Media Posts

If you’re already posting on social media, then your existing posts are good places to cull content for recycling.

TIP: Whenever one of your social media posts gets a lot of traction, take note of which post it was. Keep these lists of posts in a handy place, so that you can pull them out and quickly repurpose one of these posts any time you need to create content.

Again, what you’re looking for are posts that show evidence of being popular. This includes a lot of likes, shares, reactions, and comments.

Next…

Browse Your Community Posts

Do you post in other communities online? If so, these are all sources for potential content. Examples include:

• Guest content you’ve created for other people.
• Comments you’ve made on other people’s blogs.
• Comments you’ve made on other people’s social media pages.
• Posts you’ve made in groups (such as Facebook or LinkedIn groups).
• Posts you’ve made on niche forums.

And any other content you’ve created and shared on other peoples’ sites and web properties.

Check Out Your Products

Do you sell books, videos and other information products? Then browse through your most popular products to determine what topics, modules, chapters or sections are likely the most popular among customers. These are all pieces of content you may consider repurposing.

TIP: Don’t forget to consider items such as lead magnets, and products in other formats such as webinars.

Next…

Look In Your Newsletter Archives

Do you publish an online newsletter? If so, that’s yet another source for potential content to repurpose. As always, pay particular attention to those pieces of content that seemed most popular, including those that people emailed you about, those that continue to be popular in the archives, and those that received a lot of shares.

Go Way Back

If you’ve been online and creating content for a while, then you probably have a lot of content floating around online. Go way back into your archives to dig up this content. If it’s evergreen and continues to be a popular topic today, then you can probably repurpose the content.

Here’s where to find this content:

• Use Archive.org to locate content on websites that are gone or have changed significantly.

• Check your older computers, flash drives, CDs and other storage to find older content.

• Run a search for your name (or pen name) online to uncover articles, videos and content that you may have forgotten about.

So once you find all this content, how exactly do you repurpose it? That’s next…

Step 2: Repurpose The Content

At this point you should have your hands on a lot of content, and you’ll continue to add to this pile of content every time you post something new online. This includes everything from lengthy books to 140-character Twitter posts. Here’s how you repurpose it…

Turn Content Into a Different Format

Just because content is in one form (such as text format) doesn’t mean it needs to stay in that form. You can and should convert your content to multiple forms. For example:

• Turn a text article into an infographic.
• Turn an infographic into an article or video.
• Overlay an interesting quote or statistic on an image, and turn the whole thing into a shareable graphic.
• Transform text content into a video.
• Turn a video into text content.
• Convert an audio into text.
• Convert an audio into video.

And so on. We could go through all the combinations, but that would start feeling like you’re watching paint dry. The point is, you can turn any type of graphic, text, audio or video into any other suitable format.

Next up…

Break Down Bigger Pieces of Content

You’ll notice that we talked about big pieces of content (like entire books) a few moments ago. But that doesn’t mean you need to share huge pieces of content. Instead, what you can do is browse through your lengthy pieces of content to locate excerpts and snippets that would work well on social media.

For example:

• Dig out short quotes, tips, tricks and statistics to post on Twitter.

• Pull an excerpt out of a report or article to answer a question in a Facebook or LinkedIn group.

• Excerpt out charts, infographics, illustrations and other graphics to share on social media.

• Break out excerpts to turn into short video clips to share on YouTube.

Those are just a few examples. Again, you can do this in a multitude of ways—just put on your thinking cap (apologies to elementary school teachers everywhere) and get creative!

Compile Multiple Pieces of Content

Still another thing you can do is combine content to create something entirely new.

For example, let’s suppose you’ve posted a popular “rant” on your blog, as well as a related article that shares tips. You can combine these two pieces of content to create something new. You might even put it into a different format, such as an infographic or video. Badda bing, badda boom… you have entirely new content, and it only took a few minutes to create!

Modify Content Lightly

Still another way to repurpose content is to modify or expand on what you already have.

For example, let’s suppose you have an article with the top ten tips on some topic. Obviously, you could post the short tips as-is on social media. Another option is to excerpt out each of the ten tips to create ten social media posts, and then expand on each tip slightly to add value and to create something unique. It’s a great way to quickly create a lot of content fast.

So recycling content is a great way to maximize you content strategy. Here’s another way…

Outsource The Task

If you don’t like creating content, if you don’t have time to do it, or if you simply don’t do it very well, then have someone else do it. You can delegate the task to someone else on your team, or you can outsource it to a competent freelancer. Check out freelancing sites like Elance.com or UpWork.com to find freelancers, but be sure you’re hiring competent professionals.

Keep An Eye Out For Ideas

Once you open your eyes and start looking around, and you’ll find post ideas everywhere. You’ll see popular topics on other people’s blogs, a comment will give you an idea, even a product review will give you an idea.  Be sure to write ‘em down whenever you see them, as this saves time later when it’s time to brainstorm posting ideas.

TIP: You might use a “clipping” app like Evernote, which lets you quickly and easily clip content online, add a note to it, and save it in your ideas folder.

Quick Recap

Social media marketing begins with creating content, and savvy marketers are always looking for ways to maximize their content strategy. You just discovered our favorite ways to create more content faster than ever to save time and money.

Once you have your content in hand, then your next task is to maximize exposure to this content. That’s next…