Content marketing

Social Media Advertising: The New Content Marketing Model

For decades, the cutting edge of music technology was the phonograph and the wax cylinder. People thrilled at hearing live music without a band for the first time! Sure, the cylinders only held about two minutes of audio, but that was two minutes more than any previous technology.

Modern music fans would feel constricted if they were limited to two hours of audio. We have devices that can stream an infinite amount of music. Wax cylinders were a breakthrough at the time, but no one is clamouring to bring them back.

It took over a hundred years for music to go from the phonograph to the cloud. Marketing technology is advancing at ten times the rate. Even though social media is only a decade old, conventional social media advertising is starting to feel like two minutes of scratchy audio engraved in wax.

Let’s take a step back and look at what isn’t working about the current model, and what a new content marketing model for social media might look like.

The Old Model: Hub-and-Spoke
The “classic” content marketing model is to have a central content hub on owned media, like your corporate blog. You publish to the blog, then link to the content on social media, your “spokes.” Then your followers see the post and leave the social media site to consume the content.

This model is built on at least four obsolete assumptions:

  • Every part of your audience is universally interested in the same type of content
  • Your followers represent the majority of your potential audience
  • Your post will be seen by all of your followers
  • Your post will be optimised for mobile viewing, where a majority of your followers are consuming content

These assumptions might have held true in the early days of social media, but the landscape is changing rapidly. You may have multiple audiences, each demanding uniquely relevant content. Your followers are just a small percentage of the people who might be interested in your content. News feed algorithms can mean that the vast majority of your followers won’t see your updates. Mobile readers are less likely to leave their social media app of choice to visit your content.

Going Hubless
At Social Media Marketing World 2017, Mirum Agency President Mitch Joel proposed a new “hubless” model. Joel said he views his site as more of a content repository than a hub. If people visit the site, they can find his content there—but his model doesn’t depend on pulling people in. Instead, Joel publishes each piece of content on multiple sites: Medium, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

This strategy has several key advantages over the hub-and-spoke model:

  • Audiences can consume content where they’re already browsing
  • His content is automatically formatted to be mobile-friendly within each site’s app
  • It’s easier to share content within the site, expanding his potential audience.

The New Model: Hubless, Targeted and Amplified
Joel’s hubless model is a great step forward for content marketing. With a few extra tweaks, though, it can be even more successful. You can use LinkedIn’s targeting features to segment your audience for hyper-relevancy, and social media advertising to expand your reach. With these modifications, you can address all the shortcomings of the old model:

  1. Publish content on LinkedIn – only individuals can publish on LinkedIn. Use this opportunity to put a human face on your brand, whether through your CEO, marketing team, or other employees.
  2. Link to the content on your Company Page – Make it a targeted update that only the most relevant segments of your audience will see.
  3. Boost top Company Page performers with LinkedIn Sponsored Content – Use Audience Expansion to reach a bigger, but still relevant, audience.

With this model, each audience segment sees only your most relevant content. You also reach a larger potential audience than just your followers, and make sure your followers can see your content where they’re most likely to engage with it. And your content will look great and load quickly on our platform.

To guide your audience to the next step, consider using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms in your Sponsored Content Campaigns. These forms integrate seamlessly with the LinkedIn mobile app, so your audience can convert without leaving the app. They can even use autofill to fill out the form with information from their LinkedIn Profile.

If you’re still rocking the same social media strategy that you had in 2007, it’s time to upgrade to a new content model. It’s definitely worth keeping your site as a content repository and lead capture tool. But don’t build your entire strategy on driving traffic from social media to your site. With a hubless model, you can meet your audience where they are, and go from content to conversion without pulling them back to your hub.

To learn more about the new content marketing model, download The LinkedIn Content Marketing Tactical Plan.