Quick Way to Give your Content Legs
Never spend time and effort (and money!) on anything unless you have an endgame and a follow through strategy to match that endgame. That goes doubly for the quality content you generate (and should be generating) for your business. Now more than ever search engines (particularly Google…SEE Hummingbird and Penguin 2.0) grade your website based on the authority it has on a content level. (This week’s Help Thy Client article will be on content marketing, so more on that later). So, if you are doing your due diligence and creating the content, you don’t just want to bottle it and put it on the shelf do you? Who wants to wait to be discovered when you can get your content out in front of your audience faster and more effectively, right? That’s where the Content Distribution Tools by AddThis comes into play.
Yes, it’s just one of many tools you can employ in your content distribution strategy, but this baby didn’t get ranked #1 by comScore for Content Distribution for nothing.
How your Content Gets Shared with AddThis
At the very top left of this very article (and all our articles) you will see a small AddThis tool embedded into the page (it’s aptly titled simply SHARE). Click on it and it expands into our selected social networks or channels. The last selection (MORE) gives you the opportunity to open all the social networks that AddThis currently integrates with (currently there are over 300).I should say that AddThis has multiple ways you can embed their tool (in size, in look, in purpose) so you should check them out at AddThis.com for yourself. Southern Tide Media chose their wordpress post integration.
Here’s how you want this to work. Generally speaking, you want most if not all of your quality content to ‘live’ on your main domain (or at least a company controlled domain) so you can better ‘control’ it. It’s from this central hub that you want to push out your content, so all links (and traffic) lead back to the one place you need it the most – YOUR company website. So when a user comes by your blog (or your newsletter, or your article shared in another channel), they will have the easy opportunity to SHARE your content further, thus giving you, your brand, and your content the opportunity to expose MORE people. Ever hear the saying, those who cast the biggest net catch the most fish. Same concept.
[Please Note: I did say ‘generally speaking’. A great content marketing strategy isn’t just posting content on your own website. But again, look for the next Help They Client article for more on that.]
Pfft…If my audiences wants to share, they’ll just cut and paste my links.
Well, there is that way. But remember, in all aspects of business (and marketing…and hell life for that matter), if you want someone to do something for you, you have to make it as easy and as effortless as possible. That’s a fact. For online user experiences, we call it friction. Too much friction (too many steps, too many links to click, etc), and you impede action. There are added benefits to using tools such as AddThis. The biggest being (and its an aspect we harp on at Southern Tide Media all the time) is analytics. Yes, you could leave your audience up to their own devices to share and push your content. They did it before AddThis and such tools, and they can do it without them. But, you wouldn’t know in any real sense of the word when and where and how it was happening. With AddThis, you can analytics, which tells you in real time when a user has shared your content, what piece of content it was, and in what social network it was shared. This allows for you to have a follow through. For example, you can track your content back to the new channel, and if its a channel that allows a forum like discussion (like Facebook, like Linkedin, hell like most of them…that’s why they call it social) you can join that conversation as the authority of your own piece. It adds credence and credibility. Two things a business can never have too much of.
