We look at four good examples of brand publishers using social media to get their content shared, and their products and services to potential customers.
The biggest question facing any organisation that commits resources to content creation is a simple one. Is anyone reading this?
The balance between creating unique, sharable content that informs readers while drawing attention to your service, can be a difficult one, but the results can make it worthwhile. Content marketing allows companies to produce content aimed at bringing their products directly to the attention of customers, while social media provides a perfect opportunity to connect with readers interested in the topics covered.
It comes as no surprise that many of the most successful brands that produce their own content are marketing companies. In publishing their own content, these companies have a number of aims. Some include:
- To bring their own marketing tools, products and services to the attention of potential customers.
- To offer advice to those involved in, or thinking of getting involved in, their own content marketing strategies, giving examples of techniques that can be used to boost their popularity.
- To convert that attention that has been gained, either for their own products or for others, into tangible results – usually in this case sales of, or subscriptions to, products.
- To become part of a conversation on Twitter, LinkedIn, and on news sites, around their area of expertise. By publishing data and research from their own work, brands can build up authority and profile.
Every day in Spike, brand and marketing content vie with conventional publishers for shares, tweets and attention on timelines and news feeds. We looked at the content performance of three of the top marketing companies currently producing content, plus one sales firm.
1) HubSpot
Arguably the biggest marketing brand acting as a publisher today is HubSpot. The company’s blog is publishes tons of content each month. In January, they published 150 articles, which received 163,500 shares across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Some of 2014’s biggest stories show the range of content the company is capable of producing, from an ebook on the 17 SEO myths that should be left behind as we move into 2015 which received nearly 2,000 shares on Facebook, to a list of way to use more visuals on content being posted on social media with over 3,000 shares on Twitter, to an entertaining list giving a lesson in grammar which received over 4,000 shares across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
All offer great examples of the type of marketing content that can go viral by offering remarkable data and insight into the field.
And look at the range of their most shared posts over the past month in Spike:Â
One interesting point to note – HubSpot don’t just produce content based on its functionality and usefulness, they actively create it in a manner thats fun, shareable and easy to read and digest; 13 of their top 20 stories in 2014 were in list form.
2) Moz
Moz, another inbound marketing company that specialises in SEO, is another company that receives a large amount of attention towards the content it produces.
Their 10 Predictions for the Marketing World in 2015 from earlier this year was huge on Twitter, with over 3,300 tweets, while getting over 1,000 shares on LinkedIn.
January of this year saw their posts retweeted nearly 40,000 times, while receiving over 10,000 shares on LinkedIn and 6,595 on Facebook, all from just 32 posts.
How To Provide Unique Value in Your Content offered great advice on modern criteria for content while also providing insight on your company giving ‘unique value’ and received 3,200 shares across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Meanwhile, A Universal SEO Strategy Audit in 5 Steps offered advice on determining the effectiveness of your current strategy, and received 3,528 shares in total.
Many of Moz’s posts provide very specific, often technical advice around inbound marketing.
Their ‘Whiteboard Friday‘ series, which sees company co-founder Rand Fishkin giving advice at the end of every week, also proves very popular. The series of posts is pretty unique too – in a rarity for a content marketing piece, they contain video as well as text.
3) Marketo
Marketo specialises in marketing automation software for companies. Their content performs particularly well on LinkedIn and Twitter. In January 2015 they received well over 6,000 shares on each, along with a further 1,200 on Facebook.
Their biggest story from that month offered advice on combining both social media and blogging.
Marketo’s strength lies in producing straight to the point, serious content that offers practical advice to their audience.
One of their most popular stories in 2014 was on how to redefine and retell your brand’s story. Naturally, everyone with a product or brand wants to keep it constantly fresh and up to date, and with 2,000 retweets (and 1,000 across Facebook and LinkedIn) it clearly resonated with many potential leads.
Their 14,000 shares from 32 pieces of content in the first month of this year prove their ability to spot interesting topics and produce quality content is on point.
4) Salesforce
If marketing is the art of getting your product or brand out there in the public consciousness, sales is the art of turning that attention into tangible results by putting numbers on the board. In that regard, its hard to look past Salesforce as probably the most active sales company producing content and getting plenty of social attention.
The company is hugely visible on LinkedIn. Their 2015 State of Marketing eBook, which provides insights and detail about the 2015 in Marketing, was shared 1,388 times on the platform. A transcript of an interview with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on the impact of the big data revolution on businesses was similarly successful.
In total, the company got 55,700 shares on LinkedIn and 14,000 on Twitter in January from just 180 posts.
Interestingly, one of their biggest stories of last year was another eBook on choosing which CRM solution your fits your company the best which received great attention on LinkedIn with over 1,000 shares, showing the company has perfected the knack of seeing success with both their long and short-form publications.
Its clear from the data that we’ve looked at that content creating marketing and sales brands have a wealth of knowledge to spread. What also shines through from looking at just a few great examples, is that if that knowledge is published in a well written, easy to read and straightforward manner, readers respond by passing it on. This can bring brands and products to the attention of consumers, fulfilling the purpose of content marketing efforts in the first place.
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