Of course, sharing or publishing good content is only part of the picture. And a small part at that. Effective content and social takes more than just ‘putting it out there’.

Promoting your content is vital. Promotion has a compounding effect because it means more people will not only see but also share your work among their own networks. So when done right, the return is exponential.

So in this post we’d like to help you get the maximum attention for the content you’re putting out into the world.

The good news is, the additional steps required aren’t too complicated. In fact with the right guidance, it’s a process that anyone can follow.

The critical metric of your content and social media is the level of engagement it generates among your target audience. That means the likes, shares, comments and general interaction your content generates.

The key to creating strong engagement is to understand your audience and how well your content resonates with their needs. So constantly monitoring your results is vital. You need to measure to manage.

When you generate engagement, then you have an open channel to talk to your audience directly. That is the one area we don’t automate.

The key to engagement is Emotional Intelligence. Empathy. It needs to be you, or your team, listening carefully and building human connections.

You then want to keep an eye on the overall results of your efforts. You’ll want to measure the key metrics in ways that help you define better strategies moving forward.

Reporting your progress means you can constantly improve and adapt your approach.

Finally, you need to keep an archive of output and results. Over time this gives you valuable data – and a useful repository of content to repurpose, recycle or simply mine for data.

You may be wondering how you’ll you find the time to take care of it all. And if you were doing it manually, you’d be right.

So we’ve distilled the process down…

The 9 steps to winning content and social

Phase 1 – Craft the message

Step 1/ Researching existing content

Step 2/ Curating existing content

Step 3/ Creating original content

Phase 2 – Spread the message

Step 4/ Publishing original or curated content

Step 5/ Promoting original content – this is probably the most important element of content marketing. Our recommended split is 20% on content creation and 80% of time/resources on content promotion.

Phase 3 – Spark the conversation

Step 6/ Monitoring – listen carefully to what your market is saying, keep your finger on the pulse of your industry

Step 7/ Engaging – reap the rewards – what’s the chat app that all the sites are using? Mention this and set it up on IFTTT.

Phase 4 – Tweak the approach

Step 8/ Reporting – measure to manage capture the relevant data in an actionable format

Step 9/ Archiving – keep records for review, assessment, repurposing/tweaking

Our next blog posts will cover automation systems and processes for each phases outlined above.