Do you want to be seen as a thought leader in your industry?

Is content marketing part of your strategy?

With the increasing amounts of content cluttering up our screens, it’s more crucial than ever to cut through the noise with relevant content that will engage the reader. Content that resonates with its audience will result in them coming back for more and also sharing your words of wisdom with far larger audience than just that of your own; turning you quickly into an influential thought leader in your respective industry.

It’s true that nowadays there are more people creating content but equally there are more people active on social platforms. In social media, you have the world’s largest focus group providing businesses with unsolicited opinions about products and services. By harnessing this social data, companies can leverage it to produce content that the consumer wants to read.

In this article, we show you 7 quick and easy ways to create relevant content using social data. 

#1 Connect Your Content to Business Value
A 2014 Forrester Research/Business Marketing Association/Online Marketing Institute study found that 85% of B2B marketing leaders fail to connect their content to business value. Sophisticated tools enable us to crunch the data more accurately than ever before, providing actionable insights to many business questions. The analysis, below, has gathered social data from 2015 to gain granular customer insight into a supermarket’s home delivery service.Consumer insights, that are drawn from the conversations had on social platforms, can be found nowadays in no time at all. By adding this extra research to your content you can add value where most B2B marketers fail.  

#2 Pounce On Content That Is Resonating
That’s right. It’s not always necessary, nor feasible, to continually create outstanding, influential content from nothing. There’s no harm in biding your time whilst observing the current landscape on social of your target audience and then pouncing at the right time on the resonating content to make it your own. The key here is that your brand enhances the content in its own way; adding value to the old content for the reader.

With social media listening tools, it’s possible to observe the landscape of any online community, across a multiple of social platforms, that you wish to target with your content.

Carlsberg did this to great effect recently. Capitalising on the social buzz around “that” Protein World advert (see graph). Carlsberg added value to the original content by putting their own comedic twist to the advert on April 30th.(photo credit: The Drum)#3 Involve Influencers to Spread the Word of Mouth
By identifying those that already have influence in your target audience, you can choose to curate their thoughts and feature it in your own content or you can ask them to help spread your own wisdom within the online community.

Asking an influencer to guest blog, answer a Q&A session or perhaps to promote your brand via social media will add third party endorsement and prevent you from talking about yourself all the time.

A look at the common interests of followers of @TelegraphSport on Twitter gives us some idea of people and organisations that may resonate well within the Telegraph’s social community.

#4 Create a Keyword List
If getting found and being heard is the name of the game then you need to understand how your reader may be searching for you. Keyword research can help you optimise your content to build a large following.

So whether it’s posting a tweet or sharing a blog, knowing the top mentions and top hashtags in your reader’s online community will help your influential content get found. #5 Find Out What Type of Content is Resonating with Your Audience
As marketers, we have many different types of content at our disposal with which to market our brand. The best strategy will always be getting the right content in front of the right person at the right time. Using social media listening tools we can analyse which types of content our audience likes to consume. Analysis of the type of content that is resonating with your followers, current or target, allows you to build a better persona of your reader. Understanding how to present the certain pieces of content to your reader may be the difference them coming back for more and looking elsewhere.

#6 Show the Data to Add Value
Data, love it or hate it, used in the right way will add value to your message by educating the reader further and by giving them something to take away.

Social data analytics have moved on from the vanity metric, pre-historic days of counting “likes” and “how many people follow you”. Sophisticated tools enable us to crunch the social data more accurately than ever before to provide us with actionable insights to many business questions.  If you’ve got the tech and the data is there, include it in your work as it will get noticed by the reader.

#7 Target Readers, Not Buyers
The reader who is engaging in your content and (hopefully) sharing it may never actually buy anything from you. Of course it is important to target buyers, but it’s equally as valuable to target those who are just going to read and share your content because this is what gives your message its reach – and that’s what being an influencer is all about.