Fueling Content Promotion with LinkedIn Groups

Fueling Content Promotion with LinkedIn Groups:

As I’ve said before, creating great content is only half the battle. It doesn’t matter how well-written, informational or engaging your content is if no one sees it. If no one reads your content then no one will link to your content, which means the blog post/article/video/etc isn’t doing much good for your SEO. Content promotion is just as important as content creation!

There are multiple platforms you can promote your content on including: •Social networking sites •Social bookmarking sites •Industry sites •E-newsletters •Document sharing sites •and more

Personally, I am a huge fan of using social networking sites for content promotion. Not only do social networking sites present your content in front of a vast audience of potential customers, the search engines are also using social signals as a ranking factor. The more times a piece of content is shared/tweeted/Liked/posted the more links it has and the more valuable it becomes in the eyes of the search engines. Of the Big 3 social networking sites, comprised of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, I have found that LinkedIn is one of the best at driving traffic, encouraging engagement and actually converting my target audience. The same may not hold true for every business, but many B2B marketers have reported that LinkedIn is the most useful social network for this company. I think that’s because LinkedIn Groups are the perfect platform for content promotion.

Think about it this way. When you post a piece of content to your Facebook wall, it has the potential of being seen by every single one of Facebook’s 800+ million users. But how many of those 800+ million are actually your target audience? 10 million? 1 million? 100,000? Are you connected with every single one of those 100,000 target customers? Posting your content on Facebook is a bit like a tree falling in the forest. It might get noticed by some; it might also never reach the right person. Facebook’s user base is so broad that it’s hard to single out your target market.

That’s where LinkedIn Groups has the advantage over Facebook. People join LinkedIn Groups that describe them; their industry, job title, hobbies and so forth. It could be a group as broad as “marketing professionals” or as niche as “Des Moines Iowa Soccer Moms.” When you submit a piece of your content to a LinkedIn Group, you know that it is being presented to the exact audience you are trying to target. This makes is much easier to create custom content for each segment of your target audience and know that you are reaching them.

Join the same LinkedIn Groups of your target market so that you can share your content with them. For instance, as an SEO consultant I belong to a number of SEO and Internet marketing groups on LinkedIn. But I also belong to small business owner groups, digital marketing groups, e-commerce groups and so forth. I know that people in those groups are interested in the content I put out.