Social Media is now a Full Time Position
If you look at any leading brand successfully utilising social media, they will usually have a social media executive or manager running the show behind the scenes. Sometimes social media accounts are even run by entire teams of people, given the growing thirst for answers and more regular updates.
As a direct result of this, the modern day marketing department has had to evolve to cater for a new breed of audience; sure we are still the same audience, but our collective desire to capture and retain more new and relevant information is growing stronger by the day. I believe this is due (in part) to the ever increasing mass of content that is now made available to us every day online.
Social AND content marketing have now overtaken SEO, email and display as the Digital marketing priorities for 2014…
The game has changed, but that should be viewed as a very positive thing. Thousands of contacts and potential customers are just waiting for you to reach out to them if approached in the right way. So its game over to the drafting / planning of letters and that bulk marketing email, these days we can reach 10,000 likeminded people with a message and a mouse click in less than 3 seconds… (Although in some instances only in 140 characters or less…)
We’re not suggesting for a second these other mediums are now completely dead! Far from it! Like all elements of the wider marketing landscape, they can all still be used to compliment and enhance one another’s success rate if used together correctly.
Even at this point though, we can start to understand why so many businesses now view social media as a full time role within their own organisations. If you are reading this and you happen to run a business, then you may already know only too well the challenges involved with trying to juggle running a business and successfully managing your social accounts. It can be tough, frustrating and at times quite stressful…
Well the bad news (or ‘good’ – in our view!) is that it isn’t going away…
Above: A Forecast of Marketing Spend Increases for B2B & B2C businesses in the UK for 2014.
Google is showing us how it wants us to use social media
Google wants us to stop thinking about keywords and more about helping people. Therefore the only way to ‘rank’ (if that’s even an applicable term anymore) is to create great content, optimise it and make it shareable. Social media has allowed us to take complete control of the latter, which leaves only the content writing itself.
You need someone who can deliver targeted articles, to the highest possible standard and in record time. Businesses need to embrace social media and start thinking seriously about their content and where it’s going to come from.
Only when you have a solid content marketing process in place, will your articles and / pages begin to ‘rank’. More importantly the more articles you can generate that are able to achieve new ranking positions, the more visible your website will become. Maintain this trend, increase the visibility and reach of your website and champion the promotion of great content; by the time you are done, appearing sporadically for just a handful of vanity keywords will have become a thing of the past.
