The organic reach of posts to company pages has dropped dramatically across Facebook and LinkedIn over the last year and has changed the way inbound marketers approach social media and content distribution.  Investing more time and money in paid social advertising has become necessary to see the same kind of reach once found through a simple post to a company page.  Assembling a diverse library of content including videos, infographics and microblogs and acquiring the right tools and people to distribute it is necessary to remain relevant.

“What I reckon is you have to split your energy 50-50. This means 50% of your efforts should be targeted toward content creation and 50%, should be, on content promotion and content distribution.” – Ranking By SEO

Links Are Struggling

“Almost everyone has noticed that simply sharing your content from other platforms, and even full-length articles on LinkedIn’s own publishing platform doesn’t get the reach it once achieved.” – Marginally Coherent

Many marketers have taken to posting their links in the comment section to avoid the algorithms geared toward keeping people on their platform.  Links used to be steady performers on nearly every platform, however platforms are now burying these posts in hopes of keeping people on their site and driving paid advertising revenue.  Many people I’ve spoken to prefer links as they bring you to a well optimized page with graphics and appropriate white space.  Despite a claim to favoring “quality content”, the reality is that social media platforms are favoring anything that keeps you in front of their advertisers.  Without initial engagement from loyal followers and coworkers, link posts stand little chance of reaching a wide audience.

Microblogs Are All The Rage

“Stories work better than facts. Stories capture attention. Stories are remembered and can be very persuasive”. – Search Engine Journal

Microblogs are essentially just shorter blog posts primarily geared towards driving social media engagement.  These posts traditionally have shown quick tips or inspirational quotes but have evolved into a means of showcasing the personality of the poster and their brand.  Everyone loves a great success story, but one has to wonder how long this trend will last.  Creating a real connection with your potential buyers is important these days, but how long before customers realize these posts are simply marketing tools?  It’s not to say the content contained in these posts isn’t appealing or valuable, or those posting them have bad intentions, but how likely would they be to share this information if they weren’t angling for customers?  While these posts help to initiate conversations, the true connection is built through one on one interactions after the fact.

Organic Video Drives Engagement

“Without a doubt, to help with your organic stats you should be posting native video content to your Facebook page.” – Matt Horne

Native video is simply video that has been uploaded directly to a social platform instead of providing a link to one on your website.  The organic reach of video is immense and not limited to Facebook.  LinkedIn is now dominated by the aforementioned microblogs and native video.  Some studies have shown their reach to more than double that of a written post or link.  It doesn’t take a lot, even posting one or two videos a month can greatly increase your reach.  Although the quality of your content is important you don’t have to spend a fortune to benefit from video.  Simple text videos or even a value-filled rant recorded on your cell phone or computer can explode across a social network.

The most important thing to remember is that social media thrives on trends, and as such, the way you distribute content will continue to evolve.  Clearly video has staying power, but it is best to keep a constant eye on what is performing well and why.