6 Steps to Creating Long-form Content for Social Media Sites
If you’re a marketer, it’s obvious that one of your biggest worries is lead generation. You’re always looking for new ways to capture more leads for your business. And you’re not alone.
According to State of Inbound report, generating traffic and leads is by far companies’ top marketing challenge.
But often times, it’s difficult to get leads that will ultimately become your customers. But what if you can tap into the power of social media content marketing to acquire more targeted traffic and leads to your website?
That’s exactly what long-form content on social media will do for your business. There is a big audience on social media. There are about 2.46 billion monthly active users on social media with that expected to reach 2.62 billion by the end of 2018.
However, it’s difficult to stand out amidst the noise on social media. One way you can stand out is through long-form content. Now there is lots of debate in the SEO world on how long should a blog post be but for this article we are going to focus on getting more external content on social media, to point back to your blog pages.
Benefits of long-form content on social media.
There are many advantages of publishing long-form content on social media. Let’s consider a few of them:
- You can analyze a complex concept easily.
- Users don’t need to go to your website before they access this content.
- Your content can be found on search engines. According to several studies, search results on Google’s first page are usually 2,000 words or more.
- You build your reputation as an expert in your industry.
- It is an opportunity to capture more leads.
There are simple steps you can follow on dedicated social media portals to give you the best chance of capturing leads for your business. We’ll consider these 6 steps:
i). Define your social media goals: What do you want to achieve with your content on social media? In this case, you’re trying to capture more leads. But you have to engage your readers and provide value to achieve it.
ii). Decide whether it’ll be gated or non-gated: This is where you decide how you want to capture leads. Do you want more reach for your content or are you willing to sacrifice reach for leads?
Gated content is content that requires readers to submit their information like name, company, email address, etc. before they can access your content. The objective is to capture leads before you get the value in the post. Here is an example of what I mean…
Another way is that you can leave the access open for every reader. This gives your post more reach. You can have a link to subscribe later in the post to capture leads. Most people bounce off a page if they have to submit their information which means gated content may have a lower reach.
iii). Define value for your audience: People see value differently. Some people require little to derive value from your content while others require a lot before they’re satisfied.
What is value to your audience? You can check the long-form content that has performed well in your industry in the past to get a clue of what is expected of you to provide value.
iv). Perform keyword research: What do you want to write about? What are the words your readers use when they talk about this topic or when they go on search engines?
Let your keyword research guide you in writing a new topic or writing an old topic with a new insight.
v). Write your post: Now you have to write which is probably the most important step as you have no content without this. If you want to capture leads, you need quality content for this.
You can either write the post yourself or get a great writer to write for you to connect with your readers.
One other thing you also have to add to your content is visuals. After all, articles with images get 94% more views than those without.
vi). Optimize for conversions and promote your content: In your content, you should always insinuate to your readers that they can get more benefits when they submit their information to you.
You have to promote your content to give it as much exposure as possible.
Let’s consider how you can implement these steps in the following social media channels.
The Rise of Social Media Content Marketing – Navigation Links
Long-form Content for LinkedIn
Long-form Content for Facebook
Posts for Google My Business
Long-form Content for Medium
Business Q & A for Alignable
How to create long-form content for LinkedIn (Posts, Formually Pulse.)
You can create long-form content on LinkedIn majorly through the new LinkedIn Posts feature (Pulse has gone away). The shift from “pulse to posts” happened sometime in the last two years after Microsoft purchased Linkedin in 2016.
If you do posts on LinkedIn consistently and implement the right strategies, you can easily drive traffic and leads to your business by publishing on LinkedIn with Posts.
Here’s how you can go about this.
- Keyword Research for LinkedIn
What are the terms people use when describing the topic? Content on LinkedIn usually has a professional tone and those are the words you must look for when looking for keywords.
For your post on LinkedIn, the headline is very important. According to research by Noah Kagan and Search Wilderness, they found that How-to articles and listicles perform best on LinkedIn as they got average views of 22,368 and 16,364 respectively.
This is a How-to post by Richard Branson that has over 1 million views and over 15,000 likes
This is a listicle by LinkedIn CEO, Jeff Weiner, that has over 180,000 likes, we can’t all be the CEO of LinkedIn but what we are saying here is always swing for the fences.
Include a number in your headline as they tend to perform better. Tests conducted by Marketing Experiments for an online dental company found that headlines with number increased conversion.
They compared headlines and their result is shown below.
To post on LinkedIn, check the popular posts to know what works for this type of audience. You can also use amazing tools to perfect your headline like co-schedules headline analyzer or BuzzSumo for content question topics.
1). Write your post for LinkedIn
To write your post, simply sign in and click ‘Write an Article’ in your usual message posting section of your LinkedIn profile.
After this, you’re transferred to the LinkedIn Post editor where you can see a new blank post ready for your input.
You can craft your post now. Add pictures to your post. According to Kagan, posts with images have a greater number of LinkedIn shares, likes, comments, and views. After this, you can publish your post.
2). Optimize for conversions on LinkedIn Pulse
To optimize your post for conversion, you can offer an ebook or any freebie that will attract your readers to give you an opportunity to capture leads.
Jeff Bullas in a LinkedIn post offered a resource at the end of the post to capture leads.
The link leads you to this page.
LinkedIn promotes your post when you publish it. Your connections get a notification of the title and this is why you should use a catchy title.
It is also important to publish at the right time. Research shows that posts get most views on Thursdays and Sundays and least on Fridays.
If you need more tips on when to post on social media HubSpot put together an Infographic on the Best Times to Post on Social Media.
How to create long-form content for Facebook Notes
You can create long-form content for Facebook through Facebook Notes. You can create Facebook Notes both on your personal profile and your pages. I’ll be considering pages here.
1). Write your post on Facebook Notes
To create notes on your Facebook page, navigate to the page settings. Go to Apps and add Notes app.
Go to the Notes app. Here, you can see your published notes and drafts. At the top right corner, you’ll see the + Write Note button. Click to start your note.
To add links to your notes, you use the URL or HTML code. You can also upload your picture below the text. This will turn to code in the text.
After writing your post, you can publish it.
2). Optimize for conversions on Facebook Notes
You’ll have a link to share your notes with others. You can also leave a link to your website within the note.
Pages have RSS feeds for their notes which can help to improve visibility.
This is an example of a Facebook Note by Kristi Hines.
Below is an example of a Facebook Note by Bill Gates.
How to create long-form content for Google My Business Posts
If your business is listed on Google My Business, then you should expand your online reach by having posts in your business listing. It’s free and it can lead to more business for you. Back in 2017, I created a whole video around Google Posts, that you can watch right now.
1). Write your post on Google My Business
Google Post is usually not indexed and it can stay live for up to 7 days. This requires you to write content regularly. Under your business listing, up to 10 posts can be displayed on a list with only 2 visible to you. You can share more information about your business here.
To write your post, go to the Google My Business page and select post.
When you get to post, you can upload your picture and write your post. Note that you can add a link to your website in your post.
When your post is live, you can get the statistics of how many times your post has been viewed and your link clicked.
2). Optimize for conversions on Google My Business Posts
Google Posts is an opportunity to share important information like special discounts, new products and services, upcoming events, the satisfactory experience of your customers, etc.
You must optimize this page to get as many people to click the link to your website or take any other actions you want.
How to create long-form content for Medium
Medium founder, Ev Williams, was also Blogger’s founder and Twitter’s co-founder. As he said in 2012 when he created the platform:
Medium is not about who you are or whom you know, but about what you have to say.
On Medium, you can post on your publication or post to other publications. This platform is both a social media and blogging platform. And it’s damn powerful!
1). Create and publish a story content on Medium
When you get to the Medium homepage, you can click on the “get started” button and register for a new account.
After that, click on your profile icon and click “new story” second selection on the list to create a post.
This takes you to the editor which has a simple interface and is easy to use.
You can click the + icon to give you more options. You can either add a picture, a video, an embedded code, or a separator.
You can click on any of those if you want to insert it. With pictures, you can also position it how you like. You can either save draft or publish the story when you’re through. If you’re publishing it, you can add tags to your post depending on what type of content it is.
To check the performance of your post click on your profile and select “stats”.
It brings you a graph that shows the traffic.
Below the graph, you can see the views, reads, read ratio, and fans. Anyone who visits your post register as a view.
“Reads” are those people who read it entirely and “read ratio” measures the ratio of reading and views. Fans are the number of readers who endorse the post for your post.
1). Optimize for conversions on Medium
You can include a link to your website at the end of a post. You can also share a post on your website to Medium and link back to your website.
On Medium, every comment you make is seen as a form of a post. Adding comments to other posts can increase your visibility, which means more people view your profile and consequently your post.
Below is an example of a post by Nicolas Cole on Medium.
How to create Business Questions & Answers on Alignable
Alignable is a social site for local businesses. If you’re looking for leads that are in your locality, this is the website for you. Users refer business to other users, that’s basically how the website works.
1). Create compelling posts and Publish on Alignable
To share an update on Alignable, you can click on start a discussion to start.
If you want to view a community forum, click on discussions from the Alignable page
Under your groups, you can click on different communities to see discussions going on.
When a question is posted, the original poster can get answers from different people on the website.
If you see these questions, and it relates to your area of expertise, answer the question in detail.
2). Optimize for conversions on Alignable
On this website, apart from posting long-form content that hones your expertise, you must be willing to refer business to other people. This way, there are more people willing to refer people to you.
You get more leads which is what you want.
This is an example of a forum post on Alignable. To contribute to the discussion, click on ‘post answer’.
Conclusion
Long-form content is one of the best forms of content to gain leads because it positions you as an expert on a subject. More importantly, Google has shown preference in their search rankings for comprehensive and valuable long-form posts.
Traditionally, this type of content is popular in the blogging environment, but the audience is not as large as that of social media. Our thinking here is why not bring your best valued content to where the numbers are and use long-form content on social platforms to grow your audience.
Now, imagine how much impact, reach, and leads you could drive to your website and business if you consistently publish this valuable content on social media.
The results will only blow your mind. Though this is still a new trend on social media — but you can take advantage of it today to grow your leads and revenue through social media online marketing London ON Yes, that’s what I call it!
