Social Media Strategy: Apply Drip Marketing Ideas for Efficiency

Social Media Strategy Level- Intermediate

Drip Marketing Ideas For A Strong Social Media Strategy

I thought I'd take the opportunity to share a social media strategy I recently developed.

One of my largest issues when creating a social media strategy is finding a way to maximize on the original content that I'm creating. When you're posting 3-4 times a day per client on social media, you start finding ways to use content ideas more efficiently. Idea creation can easily become one of the most time-consuming activities, and keeping research time to a minimum can prove difficult. In this blog post, I'll cue you into my strategy for maximizing content ideas to provide the most engagement with your audience (in less time).

Social Media Strategy Step One: Determine a Blog Proposal

One of the reasons I've found this social media strategy so successful is that I've managed to combine the research portion of my blog and social media creation. Let me lay out an example for you:

One of my clients is a real estate company. Say I've determined that I'm going to write a blog post called "The Top 5 Indicators of the Recovering Housing Market". When I'm doing research for my blog topic, I will inevitably run across articles that are a great read, but don't end up hyperlinked in my blog post. So, after half an hour of searching I may have found 3-4 pieces of "anchor content" which will constitute the research for my blog post. Along with those, I will also run across 4-8 pieces that address the subject of "housing market recovery" but don't provide the direction I am looking for in my blog post.

These extra pieces of content are where you'll find gold in a social media strategy.

Social Media Strategy Step Two: Apply Drip Marketing Ideas

I'm going to make some college professors cringe, but here is how Wikipedia defines drip marketing ideas-

Drip marketing is a communication strategy that sends, or "drips," a pre-written set of messages to customers or prospects over time... Drip marketing is distinct... in two ways: (1) the timing of the messages follow a pre-determined course; (2) the messages are dripped in a series applicable to a specific behavior or status of the recipient.

Here's what you should pull from this: Drip marketing is the idea that you have a lot of information focused towards one goal- targeting a specific group or message. You use drip emails as a way to keep the company's image in the mind of a prospective customer. In the context of blog posts, you use less relevant articles as a lead-in to your "anchor" content. This strategy dramatically extends the life of your content ideas, and provides an effective way to fill gaps in your social media calendar.

So, for my social media strategy, I employ this concept to the content I have curated from around the web.

Social Media Strategy Step Three: Employ Drip Marketing

So with the example blog post "The Top 5 Indicators of the Recovering Housing Market", say I decide to post it on a Thursday. In conjunction, I will publish the extra content I gathered during the research process. Here's an example social media strategy for how I could employ this extra content I found:

• Monday: the cool infographic talking about the past and present status of the housing recovery
• Wednesday: repost the article written by a local newspaper concerning the impact of home foreclosures
• Thursday: Post the blog
• Friday: "Here's a followup to the blog post we published yesterday- it talks about 3 reasons the market hasn't recovered [link]"

It's easy to see the different ways you can engage your audience around this new content. More links in your posts, more pictures associated with your brand name, and more ways to engage with your audience. Pay special attention to the Friday example- it would be easy to foster a debate on Twitter or Facebook by providing a source which challenges your blog post.

Benefit to Experimentation and Research

Besides the obvious benefit of guaranteed, consistent content, there are many others you gain from employing this drip marketing technique in your social media strategy.

You can use this social media strategy to:

• gauge the level of interest your blog post will generate
• determine what type of content your viewers click
• figure out what days are most effective for your drip strategy
• develop a writing style which effectively links your blog posts and curated content
• shape your engagement style and material

Overall, the largest benefit to this social media strategy is saving time by using your research more effectively.