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We know that a successful social media strategy requires delivering high-quality and engaging content to users.

But can social media actually be used to help you improve the content you’re creating and offer even more value to your audience?

Absolutely.

It’s so important that content and social media feed off one another and work together in this nature.

This is what sets truly great digital marketing strategies apart from the rest.

While there are endless ways that social media can be used to improve your content marketing efforts, this post will explore four of the most impactful ways to improve your content with social media.

1. Better Understand Your Target Audiences

First and foremost, social media is one of the most powerful tools to get to know your audiences.

If you aren’t using social media to gain insights into the daily lives of your customers, you aren’t doing it right.

You should know and be able to easily answer the following:

All of this information can and should be used to guide your content marketing efforts.

With a solid understanding of when your customers are most active on social media, you can determine the ideal time to share your content, ultimately, boosting reach and engagement.

If you know what types of content your customers like and don’t like, you can avoid spending endless hours crafting irrelevant content that is likely to fall flat.

Or, you can better position a content piece that you know is valuable with a catchy headline that will grab your customers’ attention.

These are just a few examples, but you get the point. Let’s jump into another way content can be made better with social media.

2. Use Social Media as a Listening Tool

Social media should be used to monitor things like:

Monitoring this valuable information is one thing. However, social listening requires analyzing all of this data and applying it to your strategy.

Acting on these findings will help improve your digital marketing strategy as a whole but, for the sake of this article, we’ll focus on how it positively impacts your content.

Content serves many different needs. Whether the goal is to drive traffic to your site, boost keyword rankings, or enable your sales team – at the end of the day, content needs to be aligned with your audiences’ needs or it won’t drive business impact.

This is certainly not a simple task, but social listening helps make it easier.

Monitor key activity on social media to determine:

Then use this information to shape your content strategy for the better.

3. Curate Content

Don’t bore your audience. Content becomes awfully dull if you’re only talking about your brand and delivering one voice or perspective.

This is where content curation helps spice things up.

When done properly, content curation helps interact with key members in the community, engage thought leaders and industry experts, and deliver unique perspectives and value to your audience.

Use social media to curate perspectives from other industry experts and thought leaders in the space. There are many effective ways to do this.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Bonus: Social media can also be used to craft user-generated content. I’ve found this tactic especially helpful to boost content reach and show appreciation for new and longtime followers.

By successfully curating content, you will find yourself building extremely valuable relationships with other folks in the industry, while simultaneously reaching new and highly targeted audiences.

4. Help Users Digest Your Content

I debated using a “shocking” statistic here about how badly our attention spans have shortened or the continued trend of users scanning articles rather than reading them.

But I’ve had enough of the scary statistics.

What do we actually do about it?

We, as successful digital marketers, must find a way to help our audiences easily digest our content.

We cannot continue to serve content exclusively in the same way, and simply accept the fact that less than half (sorry, I said no statistics!) of users are actually reading it.

Social media is an incredible tool to help solve this problem.

Consider this:

You’ve spent 10 hours crafting a 3,000+ word piece of content that covers all of the details on a given topic.

Let’s say machine learning is the topic to make this example more tangible.

The content asset you created provides an overview of:

It’s safe to assume that most users will not get through every word of this asset.

Some users may only be looking for information in one of the many sections you covered.

Creating social media-friendly content around the asset can help make it much more digestible for your audience.

For example, put together a short video recap of what’s in the post and share it on social media.

There’s also an opportunity to break the content up into extremely digestible and shareable assets.

For example, you could create short videos covering each section of the piece and share it across social media channels.

The key is making sure that you are serving content to users in multiple ways so it can be consumed based on their unique behaviors and preferences.

Final Thoughts

In the same way that you are using content to improve your social media strategy, you can use social media to improve your content strategy.

It’s worth noting that this involves alignment across an organization.

It requires getting the rest of your team on board and ensuring social media marketing and content marketing teams are on the same page.

When both teams understand and appreciate the ways in which they can support each other, the overall digital marketing strategy will see impressive results like expanded reach, additional traffic to your site, boosted engagement and so much more.