Your Blog, Your Social Media Strategy, and the Hub-and-Spokes Content Marketing Strategy Model
Imagine your marketing strategy as a hub-and-spokes model. Then imagine your blog as the hub. You're on your way to a robust social strategy. It's as simple as 1-2-3.
Publish high-quality, authentic, useful content to your blog as frequently as you're able.
Cross-publish that blog content to other publishing channels like Medium, LinkedIn, or HuffPo.
Promote all of that content across your social channels.
This might sound like a lot of time and energy spent writing, publishing, and promoting. But with tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, or Sprout, you can get the most out of your content without spending hours every day posting pieces to social media. (I'll review and compare those tools in a future piece.)
Here are a few more best practices to get your hub-and-spokes content marketing strategy off to a great start and running smoothly.
Be disciplined about how much time you'll spend each day blogging and publishing to social media. Set a schedule and stick to it.
Put quality above quantity on your blog. I don't recommend blogging every day simply for the sake of putting words out into the world every day. There's no shortage of marketing content in the world. So, yes, commit to a goal for the number of times you'll blog each week and stick to it. But don't blog every day because marketing thought leaders say you must.
Choose your social media channels wisely. You might not have time to do them all well, and your audience might not be that active on all of them anyway. So choose the channels where your most valuable personas are most active.
Use a social media publishing tool to allow you to batch publish multiple posts to multiple channels in one sitting.
Keep a balance on your social channels of content from others, content from you, and personal content. Most people follow the 5-3-2 rule: 5 posts from others, 3 from you, and 2 personal. There are several variations on balanced social ratios, including at least one person describe this as the 3-3-1 rule. Much like which social channels you choose, how you choose to launch a balanced strategy is up to what fits you and your audience best.
Recycle your content on social media. Whichever balanced ratio you choose, you've probably noticed you're posting to social way more times per day than you're publishing to your blog. That's ok because you'll promote the same blogs on social multiple times. For instance, you might schedule social posts for a new blog once a day for a few days, then once a week for a few weeks. And if it seems to be successful, you might schedule a few more posts a few months out as well. If it's seasonal, you can schedule a few posts to revisit it when that season rolls back around.