How to Get Your Content Seen – Getting Started
Creating great content is step one. Getting it seen, however, is another matter! That’s why the gurus from the Zebra 360 Digital Marketing Agency team have compiled this easy three-part guide to help you boost your content engagement to the stratosphere. You’ll learn how to create great content according to standard best practices, how to distribute it, and how to keep that engagement rolling. It’s time to engage more meaningfully with your fans.
Use Your Tools
All modern social media marketing platforms offer a host of on-site tools to help you track and measure the results your content gets. If you’re not already doing this, you are operating blind. These tools are designed to give you the insights, tips, and data you need to power up your creator game, and they shift with each new update. So always make sure you are running the latest version of your platform’s creator tools, to ensure you have all the insight you need.
Content Distribution, or How Content Gets Seen
How does content get from your screen to your fans? On each online marketing platform, you have what’s called a distribution process, or how the platform matches users to content they expect will be entertaining, informative, or engaging to their interests. Most of this is handled by an algorithm, with no human intervention and limited organic spread, so understanding how these matches are made is very helpful.
It starts with your surroundings, history, and liked pages. What have you posted in the past? What do friends, followers, and creators/pages gauged to be similar to your post? What’s visible to a public audience?
Next, this is matched to something similar to look-alike audiences. At the core, the question is, “Who would like this?”. When was it posted, what is the topic, what have past users done with content like this, and so on?
Next is a prediction you can’t control much, but should understand anyway- how likely are people on the platform to interact with your post?
Lastly, there is the consideration of how much interaction it will generate. This is, effectively, the platform prioritising content. They thrive off of good content engagement as much as you do, so it’s natural for them to push pieces they feel will get good traction.
This creates two ways your content gets seen. Connected distribution means showing content to people who follow you, your core audience. Unconnected means posts that are shown to people who don’t follow you, but could find the piece interesting based on their past behaviour. Think of Facebooks ‘suggested for you’ posts.
Optimising For Unconnected Distribution
Connected distribution is, of course, important. However, the true power of sharing content lies in drawing in more unconnected people, and converting them to connected parties. This is how you broaden your audience. To optimise for this, you can:
Make original content: While reshares count, fresh content will get you the widest consideration for distribution. It’s distinctive and engaging in a new way, making it ‘hot stuff’.
Make sharing easy: Content that sparks (respectful) discussion or meaningful conversation around it is what people want to share, bringing you more likes and reactions.
Follow the rules: Every platform has guidelines for recommended content, which lays out what it looks for in posts it chooses to recommend. When you comply with this, you have a greater chance of being ‘picked up’ and shown to new faces.
Remember that you should also always be monitoring what you post, how it performs, and how far it reached so you can make future choices accordingly.
To truly grow the reach of your content, you need to understand how that reach is determined- and now you have a much better idea how to do that. If you’re still struggling to understand this critical first step, the team at Zebra 360 Digital Marketing Agency are always happy to help, so don’t be shy to reach out to us!
