As a part of an ongoing marketing plan, online store merchants often find themselves creating huge amounts of content. Think about it: there’s press releases, store copy, newsletters, blogs, etc. If the content within any one of those channels isn’t optimized for social-media-lite consumption, the chances of it being mentioned via social media is slim.
The power of¬† social media is being able to put something out there to see it go wildly viral within mere minutes. Hot news naturally travels fast, but if you aren’t presenting that hot news in a way that social media users can easily process and share, then your efforts may be flapping without feathers.
Here are some tips to help you optimize your content for social media:
- This is not the animal world where long tails get grabbed first: Keep it short (and sweet) for the best pick-up potential. This applies to all text content.
- Who doesn’t like posting their travel, nature, family etc. photos into Facebook albums and screen savers? It’s great to extend your photo sharing habits into your professional life as well,but make sure there is a clear photo to content connection; that applies to icons as well. No, photos of flowers, kids, beach and mountains don’t go with everything.
- Supplement  images with video link ups (contact Buystream.com, a FastPivot partner, to create great Yahoo! Store product video).
- Use good copy writing practices such as: black text on white background; CAPs / bold / italics / s p a c i n g / underlining / & color to draw attention; employing creativity (don’t be overly poetic or your meaning will be lost on the average shopper); proper grammar and a spell checker.
- DO use SEO keywords, but DON’T overuse or your content will read like spam. No one like putting that kind of junk out to their friends.
- Deliver on your promises: if you draw readers in with a catchy title and then let them down, they’ll likely never trust you again.
- If your text is going to exceed more than a few paragraphs on one page, consider building in a hot-linked table of contents.
- Make it easy for readers to share your information by including social media share options and links.
- Consistently engage readers with questions, choices, new and useful information, specials, etc. but don’t overload them with more messages than they can process at once (speaking of which, this is where we’ll end this blog).
To learn more on social media marketing strategy, we recommend reading our “Building a Social Media Roadmap Blog.”
FastPivot.com’s social media experts provide social media design, social media management, and social media consulting-coaching services. Contact FastPivot today to learn how to KICK START your social media.
