So you've just finished a very good piece on a topic that your research shows is 'hot' right now (and thus meant to attract a lot of attention, shares and traffic to your blog). You've invested a lot of time in optimising the way your content flows as well as how your article 'looks', so that first-time readers can quickly scan through it, understand its value and decide to give it a closer look and (hopefully) a couple of shares.
And now it's time for the tricky part: Distribution.
You have experienced it many times: High quality alone is not enough to get the word out for your content. You need to find the right online channels to distribute it to, and by right I mean the channels where the audience that wants to read this kind of content usually 'hangs out'.
Of course, your intuition will do some of the work: for example, if your piece is part of a B2B content marketing campaign, it's obvious that you should post it on LinkedIn. If it's a case study, text-heavy with graphs and only a few images, there's probably no point in sharing it on Pinterest.
But other than the obvious inclusions and exclusions, can you really guess all the possible social networks, Q&A platforms, communities and forums you should distribute your piece to? (Even if you answered 'yes', there is actually no reason to do use guesswork, plus you might be overestimating your sixth sense)
Let's see a couple of tips that focus on finding the right channels to distribute your content organically (paid promotion channels need another post dedicated to that).
Social Networks and Q&A platforms: Which are the ones for you?
The answer to this question has 2 parts:
-
Analysis of your site's social traffic
-
Research of competitors' social traffic
It is important to know the percentage (and quality) of traffic that each social platform drives to different types of content on your site/blog, so as to decide where it's worth investing more time (and/or budget) to promote your content. Building a presence on social networks and online communities needs effort: it's not enough to just share links to your articles, you need to interact with other users and their content, answer questions and in general contribute to ongoing conversations (which needs time and effort).
It is also essential to do benchmarking in order to see which channels work best for competitors that publish similar content to yours. It might be the case that you have been focusing your efforts on just a subset of platforms, totally neglecting others that could potentially make your content a lot more popular (I've promised myself I'm not going to use the word 'viral' anywhere in this post, I think we've all had too much of it).
Your Social Traffic: Hello, Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the perfect place to understand the quantity and quality of traffic each social medium has been driving to your content.
On the left hand side, you scroll down to Behaviour and select Content Drilldown, then you can specifically select to see all content posted on your site's blog (of course, if your site is a blog, you might as well go to All Pages).
For example, this is what the content list for the latest articles on the Blonde blog looks like:
You can then select those articles that are more relevant to your newly-created piece and add Source as the secondary dimension.
Now you will be able to see which social networks tend to drive the most Pageviews (traffic quantity), as well as the Average Time on Page and the Bounce Rates (traffic quality). If you have set specific Goals for your site, you can also check which social networks brought in traffic with good Conversion Rates (traffic quality). Note that in order to see this, you need to go to the Landing Pages view on your left hand side and select the content you are interested in.
The above will help you understand the value of different social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora etc. when it comes to boosting your content's prominence.
Your competitors' social traffic - The Revelations
Let's say that after delving into your Google Analytics data, you find out that LinkedIn is not generating that much traffic for your content so you decide to ditch it. Right?
Wrong.
Are you sure it's LinkedIn that's to blame here and not the fact that you haven't actually tried that hard to create a presence on there and adequately promote your content?
This is why it is crucial to see which social channels work for your competitors, too. It might turn out that you're relying too much on 'been-there-done-that' networks and neglecting others you are not that familiar with.
There are a number of tools out there that can help you track competitors' social traffic, one of them being SimilarWeb.
What Analytics Tools can't tell you - Groups and Communities on Social
So let's say that now you know that Google+, LinkedIn and Reddit show the best potential for your article's organic distribution. Is it enough to share a link to your piece on your company's page and submit it on a generic subreddit? Well, not really.
In order to get more people to interact with your content, you need to also find the right social media groups (or communities) and start a conversation there, accompanied by a link to your article.
Let's say your piece is about 'UX design' and see some examples below:
Google+ Communities
You start by performing a communities search around 'UX Design'. You get a number of communities around the subject. What you now need to do is to figure out which ones are the active ones: those that have a decent number of members (single member communities don't tend to be very helpful for content distribution) who post frequently but also comment and +1 posts by others. Big-sized communities whose members are pure broadcasters (only share links without interacting with content from others) are not where the value lies.
As an example, UX Design for Developers and UX & UI Design would make good choices.
LinkedIn Groups
More or less the same case as with Google+. You perform a search for relevant groups (filtering for groups that your connections are members of can be very helpful) and you can also see how active a group is right underneath its title and description.
Still, before deciding to add a LinkedIn group to your list, it's better to check whether posts also have comments, likes and shares underneath them - like with Google+ communities, groups that mainly consist of broadcasters are of little value.SubReddits
One way to start is with Redditlist, a site that gives you rankings and stats for the 5000 top subreddits. You can search for top subreddits in specific categories, e.g. technology:
However, there are only a few categories and topics are quite broad. So after picking the ones that show a relevance to your content, the next step is to also find the ultra-specific subreddits that are highly relevant. To do this, you search for specific keywords or phrases directly on Reddit and this returns lists with all relevant subreddits:
Finding the right forums to tap into conversations
A free 'tool' you can use to identify the relevant forums for your content is Google's related: search modifier. All you need is to start with a forum around your topic. For example, let's say you want to find forums around internet marketing, such as the Warrior Forum.
You perform a related: search, filter down results for a specific country and period of time and voilà: