Social Media Marketing Book

Many companies are lead down a path in social media marketing that leads them to believe all they have to do is produce content, such as blog posts, in order to gain a foothold in social media communities.  They’ve been sold some list of things to do and figure what ever they put out will be valuable content to the audiences they want to engage with.  The problem with that theory is that they believe they are the ones providing the valuable content, that they decide what’s valuable and just place it out there for the world to receive.

In chapter 29 of Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media, we discuss how your content must have value.  There’s a lot of interesting pieces that go into what’s deemed “valuable”, but at the end of the day, it’s not the companies putting out the content who decide the value, it’s really the end users.  Today’s three tips focus on that, but of course, there’s a heck of a lot more about this topic in the actual chapter.

1. The End User Decides the Value of Your Content, Not You
2. Produce What They Want
3. Make Your Content Portable, That Makes It More Valuable

Full video transcript after the jump…

Chapter 29:  Your Content Must Have Value Video Transcript

Hi I’m Li Evans and I’m author of Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media.  This book is due out on June 24th, 2010 but until then you can watch videos of the book, which is chapters of the book.  Three high level tips are in each video, and the series is called 45 Social Media Insights Over 45 Days.  So with that, lets take a look at chapter 29, which is “Your Content Must Have Value“.

Tip number one with this chapter is “The End User Decides the Value of Your Content, Not You“. That’s pretty hard for companies to take because they think that they’re putting out the valuable content and they get severely disappointed when the audience doesn’t find the same value in what they’ve put out there.  You have to realize that if you’re not listening to your audience and understanding what they find valuable, and you’re just pushing content out there, they’re likely not going to find the value in it.  So remember, the end user decides what the value of your content is.

Tip number two is “Produce What They Want“.  Again, going back to listening to your community, listening to your audience, listening to your customers, you have to listen to what they are saying, what they want and what they find valuable. That will end up helping you build stronger relationships in the social media community.

And the final tip for today, is tip number three, “Remember to Make Your Content Portable, That Makes It More Valuable“.  Content that can be easily shared, becomes a lot more valuable so whether you can post it to a Facebook page, or somebody can embed in their blog,  this makes your content a little more valuable to people because they can reuse it, and that’s where they can find some value in it.

So those are your three tips for today, chapter 29 “Your Content Must Be of Value“.  Of course there’s a lot more in the chapter than what’s in these three tips. You can find this video and other videos at SMMarketingBook.com.  I’m Li Evans and tomorrow I’ll have another set of three tips for you from the chapters in the book.

4 Responses to “Your Content Must be Valuable to Get Anywhere in Social Media”