As we approach 2014, it’s clear that online content creation is reaching an all-time high, as companies invest more time and resources in dedicated inbound marketing strategies. With more content than ever in the socialsphere and everyone’s inboxes, marketers are being challenged to get their content noticed and then read. It seems the mantra “Content Is King” isn’t enough anymore. As stated by Chad Pollitt, “Content Is King, But Distribution Is Queen And She Wears The Pants.”
So how's a time-strapped marketer like yourself going to boost the distribution of your content? And how can you encourage your organization to easily join in these distribution efforts without it taking a lot of their time?
Here’s a look at a collection of free and paid tools to help you with the distribution of your content to your particular audience.
Buffer has seen tremendous growth since it launched almost three years ago and it’s not a surprise. I personally love the simplicity and efficiency of the tool, which allows you to load your personal Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook posts with one click from any web page. The best part though is, Buffer automatically queues up your posts (once you customize your time slots) so they’re shared at the best possible times throughout the day – helping your content be seen by your followers and fans more often. This allows you to quickly load your social queue, determine which content you want to share on each social platform, and helps take the guesswork out of scheduling.
For most users the free account is sufficient but for marketing teams and enterprise level corporations, the Buffer For Business accounts offer more account connections and expanded analytics to really fine-tune your content scheduling and content mix.
Summary of Buffer’s Benefits
For many, Hootsuite needs no introduction since it’s probably the most widely used social monitoring and scheduling platform out there. Even on the free version, users have the ability to manage and monitor numerous accounts and feeds. Similar to Buffer, Hootsuite also offers an AutoSchedule feature but it’s not as user-friendly with customizing your time slots.
One of nicest features when it comes to content distribution is the ability to select and publish for more than one user account, even in the free version of Hootsuite. This comes in handy if your boss or one of your company’s executives wants you to tweet or post to LinkedIn on their behalf.
Summary of Hootsuite’s Benefits
One of the coolest new tools I’ve seen lately that redefines content amplification is GaggleAMP. Although this tool isn’t free like the two I’ve already mentioned, you’ll quickly understand its value if you’re truly looking to leverage your team member’s or business partner’s individual social networks, without relying on them to manually do it themselves.
As the graphic shows above, GaggleAMP allows your company or brand to schedule social media posts that then filter out to your Gaggle networks. These can be employees, business partners, customers or other business groups. Members of that Gaggle then have the ability to share that post from their Gaggle inbox to have control over what they’re sharing or they can customize their settings so these posts are automatically shared without manual approval.
For organizations, this can instantly solve your struggle with getting your senior team members – who have a large LinkedIn network for example – to consistently share your latest blog content. Or getting their help with sharing a timely press release.
Summary of GaggleAMP’s Benefits
Another exciting tool to aid you with content distribution, that's still fairly new, is HubSpot's Social Inbox. Use of the tool requires having a full HubSpot license but for HubSpot users, the tool beautifully integrates with your current contacts database, blog content, landing page library and more!
Like Hootsuite, Social Inbox gives you the ability to schedule social updates across numerous social platforms for multiple users. This equates to significant time savings and again the ability to take on some of the cotent distibution and promotion efforts for key members of your team. Content titles and URLs such as your blog and specific landing lages are easily populated, if hosting this content on HubSpot's CMS or COS, as you craft social updates – which again is a big time savings.
The bigger benefit of Social Inbox is the ability to cut down on the noise of social media with dedicated feeds, the ability to personalize your responses and more accurately monitor social ROI. That's a whole separate topic though!
Summary of Social Inbox's Benefits
Sprout Social has a lot of the same monitoring and publishing functionality as Hootsuite or Social Inbox but a noticeable difference are the collaboration tools, such as the team content calendar. This allows you and your team to collaboratively plan out social media schedules and review and modify social updates. Sprout also has a cool social CRM that catalogues past conversations and engagements for you.
Summary of Sprout Social's Benefits
It's a fact that online content creation and publishing won't be slowing down, meaning that the competition of getting your content noticed will only become more challenging depending on your industry. Even if you're creating higher value content than your competitors, if you're not properly disitributing it so it's noticed by your most ideal prospects it will quickly collect dust and go unnoticed. These various free and paid tools, depending on your needs, will help ensure your content gets the attention it deserves so you can attract more traffic and lead conversions.
Topics: Content Marketing
