Content marketing for social media: Where there are people, there are sales opportunities. This is how all marketers think throughout history, and with this logic, content marketing aimed at online spaces, such as social networks, is consolidated.
Whenever a big event brings together thousands of people in a specific place, there are ads for food, drinks, and conveniences in general, with the establishment of fairs in the vicinity of the festivity.
This phenomenon is foreseen by the festival’s organization, which calculates the dimensions of the environment in search of the best allocation of customers and merchants through the availability of tents for the sale of services.
Such behavior is motivated by two main reasons:
- Meeting the needs of individuals at that particular moment
- Turning them into potential customers and
- Making a product popular
- Presenting it to a larger audience
Social networks are online interfaces that accumulate billions of people in numerous profiles, the name assigned to the individual registration within the platform. The subscription is usually free, and the publication limit is infinite.
These characteristics allow vast volumes of information to be generated daily in what is called “posts,” for short, postings of texts, images, and videos by users. Many of these networks also offer the option of private messaging.
Contrary to the dynamics that move concerts and face-to-face events, what unites crowds on social networks is not the presentation of someone in particular but the sharing of material between the profiles of the website or application.
Those who use social networks look for entertainment, job opportunities, news of the day, trivia, and instruction on cooking, sports, health, cosmetics, fashion, design, and other subjects.
Therefore, it is the role of content marketing to apply, in a modern and integrated way to the context of social networks, the old formulas used by commerce around the world.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a segment of Digital Marketing that focuses on producing data for the internet. This production must adapt to the audience and the platform where it will be released.
As part of an essential group in Marketing, the production of content for the internet must follow a skeleton of actions that have proven empirically successful:
- Building a brand persona;
- Building a customer persona;
- Adaptation to the proposal of the social network worked on;
- Personalized customer service.
A post must follow the principle of stamping phrases on personalized shirts: it cannot be too simple to lose the ability to arouse interest, while it cannot be overly complex, at the risk of scaring away attention.
In other words, the content production for the internet cannot be at odds with the proposal of the website or application that carries the publications.
For example, a news site is expected to contain large text and few images. The reader who goes to this type of space expects this content format and feels frustration when finding another approach.
For social media, large blocks of text are not always the ideal choice. The amount of words tolerated per post depends on limitations imposed by the platform developers or the audience acceptance level.
“Attention Span”
This term in English can be translated as “capacity” or “duration” of a human being’s attention. Many studies analyze the impact of social media on how people perceive the world in the post-industrial era.
The central aspect of this change concerns the intense volume of information released to the human brain daily.
Data processing is not a recent issue for the human species. The development of the nervous system goes through successive challenges in optimizing the analysis of visual, sound, and tactile impulses to save energy and gain performance.
Such challenges allowed the brain to transform into this powerful processor, making it easier to perceive the environment and things. The relationship with virtual reality is configured in its new obstacle.
As an electrical engineering company, human attention works to direct and calibrate the collection, storage, and handling of information in the form of electrical impulses. Contact with social media, according to studies, caused an overload.
This overload was managed with reduced attention span; humans spend less time reading a text or concentrating on a task.
Some studies estimate that people’s “attention span” has dropped to eight seconds since the advent of social media. For content marketing, this means less time available in an attempt to capture a potential customer.
Observing this change, many social networks modify their guidelines to encourage the production of more compact material, which can be quickly assimilated. Human attention is a motor breaker that turns the focus function on or off.
This became the basis for content marketing on social networks, different from any other virtual interface.
Application Of Content Marketing On Networks
Content marketing mixes elements from different areas of knowledge and applies them, considering each social media format.
The first step in producing relevant content on social networks is to establish clear goals for the virtual presence of a brand, institution, or person. It is essential to define the purpose of the profile.
No less fundamental is to design a coherent posting plan. Planning posts in advance eliminates the chances of a cluttered feed where art and content don’t talk to each other.
If the profile of a company provides the service of installing acoustic barriers in apartments, the production of content should focus on topics that arouse interest in the product; posts about the materials used and how it works are welcome.
These two steps act on the construction of the identity of a brand or company. They are essential for enterprises that display one or more brands linked to the same institution, offering different products.
Brand identity is about the formation of a character that emulates human characteristics. This character then becomes the public voice, being able to gain a face through an avatar or logo.
Also Read: Is B2B Lead Generation Using Social Media Possible?