Content is King in Social Media

The catchy Korean music video “Gangnam Style” now has more than one billion views on YouTube. The Kickstarter campaign to create a TV show from the popular webcomic “Cyanide and Happiness” earned tens of thousands of dollars within minutes of its launch. Why? Because content is king in social media.

If you create something people want to see, they’ll come to you in droves. The bad news is that you’ll probably never be as popular as Psy or Cyanide and Happiness. The good news is that you can still use content to engage people and draw them to your brand.

The Global Village

The reason content is king in social media is because social networks make it so easy to share. The Internet gives people access to increasingly vast troves of videos, images, music and more. When you see something you like, your impulse is to share it with your friends. And on social media, your friends can be a network of hundreds or even thousands of people all across the world. If they like what you’ve shared, they can in turn share it with their networks, and the number of people who see it increases exponentially.

The rise of social media means that anyone with an Internet connection and an opinion has a platform to reach potentially millions of people all over the globe. That’s the kind of exposure that traditional marketers pay out the nose for, yet the Internet makes it free. So, when promoting your brand, the right content is king.

The Right Content

The secret to using content creation to gain exposure for your brand is to create the content that people want to see. This is not always an easy thing to gauge. However, with regard to your brand, there are questions you can ask to narrow down what will work.

What are the popular searches in your field? (There are online tools to help you find this out.) What kinds of things are people looking for? Do they want advice about particular issues? How-to tutorials related to your product? An inside look at your industry and how it works? Look at what people are searching for, and create content that gives them that.

You may decide to do it with videos, blog posts, webcomics or something else entirely. But whatever form your content takes, make it interesting, informative and entertaining. Post it on all your social media platforms, and encourage your followers to spread the word. Keep creating content regularly and promoting it wherever you can. You might not be an instant viral sensation, but if you keep at it, you’ll build up a following, and over time, more and more people will be drawn to your brand. Because content is king in social media.