Socializing Thought Leadership
Making your thought leadership materials go viral.
Making your thought leadership materials go viral.
At our agency we have a saying for B2B and other consumer companies that are engaged in social yet don’t have the likability as say Skittles or Oreo cookies. That saying is, “You don’t need a million fans.”
The reality is most companies, and most likely your company, will never have a million fans. But somehow social media marketing still gets boiled down to how many Facebook fans you have. What that notion misses is that social media for most organizations is not about how many people connect to your Facebook page. It’s about how many people talk about you positively and share your stuff. It’s about getting people to incorporate your brand and content into their social and real-world dialogues and purchasing decisions.
So this is where thought leadership and social sharing come in. In thought leadership, the share (the act of someone emailing or posting your materials to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or other social sites) can be far more valuable than a Facebook “like.” When people share your content they are a) endorsing it and b) weaving it into the very fabric of the web. It becomes popular and echoes out into blogs and mainstream media and pops more in the search engines. When this happens you not only embed your influence directly into the web – your social media marketing success starts to be realized via organic search. People search on terms related to your content and your content pops in results on other companies’ sites. This is social success realized through search!
Below are two big sets of recommendations to help you with your social media thought leadership programs:
Socially Enable Your Content
So often I see sites that “hide the share.” When you go through the trouble of producing a great chart, image, checklist, guide, or whatever – celebrate the share. Make social sharing a huge, honking call to action! Let people look smart by promoting your materials!
Thought Leadership Material Best Practices
Following are a set of guiding principles and best practices we try to apply to thought leadership materials to increase their value, power, viral distribution potential, and ultimate success. Let me start by saying while I know the power of video and the age of the white paper is not over, content development can be risky. Videos, more often than not, do not get watched in any significant numbers (I mean, we all cannot produce Honey Badger), and who wants to read a 10-page white paper? Today, content has to be lightweight. That means easy to produce, easy to consume, easy to share, and easy to republish. Here are some thought leadership content development tactics and tips to make that happen.
I hope these tactics help you spread your good materials off the web! Any other suggestions – please add them as comments!