Introduction
Social media is one of the primary vehicles for a content marketing campaign—especially the more entry-level, entertaining pieces. There are three tiers of social media promotion for your content:
Owned: Sharing your content on the brand’s own social media channels is a quick, customizable, and free opportunity to connect with your target audience.
Paid: Most social networks allow for some kind of paid advertising. Matching a network’s demographics with your brand’s personas will help you determine where to invest.
Earned: The most valuable, but hardest to create, social media promotion happens when your audience shares your content with their networks.
Each social network tends to gather a different type of user. Match your personas to network demographics to find out where you target audience is social online, and start sharing your content. Let’s cover the differences between social networks:
Website
Blog
Facebook is still the biggest social network, and while it is the fastest-growing, that growth is slowing and shifting. At the beginning of last year, Facebook usage was growing fastest among older adults. As of January 2015, Facebook users are most likely to be college-educated, lower-income women.
Emerging markets account for 78% of the traffic on Twitter, with India as one of the fastest-growing. Statistically speaking, Twitter users tend to be recent college graduates living in urban areas.
LinkedIn is commonly known as the professional social network, and it’s obvious that its users are serious. Sixty-four percent of social referrals to corporate websites come from LinkedIn, compared to 17% from Facebook and 14% from Twitter. A glance at the demographics demonstrates that LinkedIn has the greatest percentage of college-educated, higher-income users of all the major social channels.
Consumers love Pinterest. Forty-seven percent of online shoppers have made a purchase because of a Pinterest recommendation, and Pinterest generates 4x more revenue (per click) than Twitter. Pinterest users tend to be more affluent women living in rural areas.