It’s hard to read a marketing blog nowadays that doesn’t mention social media. With hundreds of millions of users worldwide, it’s easy to see why this is. More and more marketers are taking to social media as a marketing tool.
One reason is that these platforms aren’t affected by Google’s algorithm changes. However, that doesn’t mean that a strategy doesn’t have to be worked out to use them. All social media marketing needs a strategy.
One strategy that needs to be clear from the start is the type of content that will be posted.
Should you go for quantity?
Or is quality the best policy?
There can be a fine line between posting lots of content and making sure it is quality.
Obviously, if you are not posting regularly, then people won’t engage with you. However, creating quality content takes time. So what is the best strategy?
In short, quality always wins over quantity when using social media for marketing. Why is this? Why should you always choose quality over quantity?
You Build Trust
Although it is easy to start following a business or a person, it doesn’t mean that people don’t think before they click.
People will only usually start following when they’ve found something of value.
They usually will have already read some posts and then decided that they like them enough to follow. Many times people will come across older posts as well. You should always think about posting quality content to build trust and brand.
If you post too much and start constantly, share posts that are of low quality or irrelevant, then people will not be enticed to follow. You may even lose existing followers.
You Engage with People
Social media is all about building relationships. We build relationships by sharing quality content. After all, you would never think of trying converse with people just by telling them nonsense. So, do the same on social media.
The more that you engage using quality content, then the more you can build your brand. This results in more traffic to your site and the potential to generate more leads.
If your content is quality and specific to your niche, you will then engage with quality followers. With those who are interested in your brand.
This means that when building your audience, you will be building a quality follower base rather than just numbers. We’ve all heard about those who have 100s of thousands of followers.
Are they quality?
Probably not.
So, never buy followers on twitter or Facebook. Even with the amount of followers you have, you want quality, not quantity.
You Prove Your Brand
What does that mean?
Most search engines probably take into account social signals in their algorithms. So the more often a post is liked, shared, and otherwise distributed on social media, the better it ranks.
This is based on the premise that people don’t tend to share poor, low-value content. So if it is being shared, then it must be good. What happens is that you prove to the search engines that your brand is relevant and the content is of quality.
This social media engagement can also help marketers rank better because of the amount content there. Search results from all social media platforms show up in the search engine. So, the more something has been shared, the greater chance that it shows up. You also increase the chance that new people will find you and then link back to your site.
So it is clear that to use social media as a marketing tool, you should be posting quality content on a regular basis.