SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Social Media — tracks feedback from leading marketers about social media practices and issues.
This week, we asked: How many content channels does your social media presence have?
- More than 5: 25.49%
- 3: 20.59%
- 4: 15.69%
- 5: 12.75%
- 2: 12.75%
- 0: 9.80%
- 1: 2.94%
SmartBrief on Social Media readers agree: Multiplatform is the way to go when it comes to digital content!
It’s tempting to focus on how many social networks you or your company are active on — but that metric usually leaves out important venues such as blogging and podcasting. Instead, it’s much more productive to think about how many different ways potential customers can come in contact with your content.
If maintaining three or more content channels — like the majority of SBoSM readers — seems daunting to you, remember that it’s fine to adapt existing content to fit a variety of channels. Your video interview can be converted into a podcast, transcribed into a blog post or chopped up into sharable chunks on Tumblr. You can tweet about your interview on Twitter and ask your fans to share their thoughts on Facebook. That’s five kinds of content for five distinct channels with just a little bit of extra work.
If you’re restricting your content to one channel — such as your company blog — you’re not necessarily “doing it wrong,” but you might be leaving money on the table. You never know where your next customer will come from. By employing an efficient multichannel strategy, you’re giving your fans more chances to interact with your brand and form a relationship that could lead to a sale — or job offer or donation or petition signature or what whatever your call-to-action is.
How are you taking your content multiplatform?