Social media is not content. Social media is the set of tools that help you publish your content in ways that allow or encourage others to share it, find it via friends and peers, or by following.
If you want to maximize the value of your brand content, even native advertising in independent, second-party newspapers, magazines and websites, you must socialize it. If you want to maximize the value of social media to your branding efforts, you must create a social media strategy, rather than simply use social media tactics.
What’s the difference? “Strategy” is what you want to do (goals), “tactics” refers to how you want to do it (techniques). A social media strategy starts before you decide on using even one social media tool (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.).
Deciding that you will publish your content via the five or six social media tools you like to use is not a social media strategy. To create a social media strategy for your brand content marketing, you must:
•Review your target audience demographics and profile.
•Analyze your target audience’s technology and social media use.
•List, in order of importance, the social media tools your target audience uses.
•Review the best ways to push out brand content on each social media tool on your list.
•Create content that serves your marketing needs (which means creating content that serves your target audience’s needs).
•Modify each piece of content you create multiple times to fit the format of each social media tool/platform you use.
•Track the results of the socialization of your content.
If you have regular visitors to your website, starting a blog can be a big plus for your marketing efforts even if you don’t socialize the content. Making the effort to spread your blog’s content via a social media campaign will likely improve your results exponentially.