Actually, Twitter, your blog, Facebook, and LinkedIn aren’t the only options. They’re just the ones clients have asked about in the past few days. Here’s a list of places where you might post content, and why:
- On your website, probably at your blog. More good authoritative content is always good for the site where you post it. This is the number one choice for anything more than 140 characters long, unless the thing you want to post is inappropriate for your website for some reason. For example, if you are a veterinarian and you want to post something for other vets, while your website is directed to pet owners, then you might choose to post that article at LinkedIn or G+ instead.
- At an external blog. If you can’t easily post content at your own website, an external blog is the next best thing. You do not own or control things you post at social media platforms, so they shouldn’t be your go-to for posting original content.
- At someone else’s blog. Guest posts can expose your content to a new audience, and you should get a link from those posts that will bring some of that audience back to your website. Note that this means you have to have good stuff at your own website — that’s why this is not the top choice. Thoughtful comments at other people’s blogs can also be very good for bringing traffic, building relationships, and gaining links. We’re not talking about comment spam here. If you do that, please stop it right now.
- Facebook Your company should have a Facebook page, because people look for companies there. Post links to your blog posts there, so folks who find you at Facebook will go to your website, where you have control over your message. You can also curate content there — post links to cool stuff you found elsewhere online — and have conversations with people. Original content at Facebook can be beneficial, but it depends what you’re selling. People are at Facebook to have fun, so your game may benefit significantly from Facebook, but few people do recreational shopping for accounting software. Determine how much time to give Facebook by how much traffic you get and how well that traffic converts.
- Google+ G+is in many ways a Facebook alternative, but they appear to reward original content far more than Facebook does (or, probably, can). The SEO benefits of providing original content at G+ are significant enough to make it worth doing even if it doesn’t send traffic to your website.
- LinkedIn As LinkedIn seems to be copying FB and G+ more and more, they may become a more important place to post original content. At the moment, having a great profile and participating in the right discussions seem to work best. Link to your blog posts here — some kinds of businesses get good traffic from LinkedIn.
- Twitter Twitter doesn’t support much original content, though it’s certainly one of the best places to hold conversations you want to see spread around the blogosphere. We’ve seen tweets from accounts with relatively small followings reach thousands of Twitter feeds with just a few good retweets. Best plan: tweet everything that you post anywhere, including pictures and videos, but don’t spend too much time on original content at Twitter.
- Industry forum Your industry or profession may have a forum or message board where people hang out and talk seriously about issues within your field. These sites can be very good places to build relationships and to demonstrate your authority. Answer questions that you can helpfully answer, and think of your answers as very short blog posts — they should be that well thought out and articulate. In order to increase conversions at your website, you would need to do this at the places where your patients, customers, or clients hang out, not at the places where your colleagues are.
Share information everywhere, but be efficient about it to get the best results.
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