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Neal Schaffer: Content Marketers Need Targeted Social Media

Neal Schaffer weighs in on what content marketers are doing wrong on social media.

What makes for the best digital content? It solves your readers’ problems and sets itself apart from the gazillion other articles floating around the internet. But unless you know your target audience it’s going to have zero effect on your business.
What should you do? Use targeted social media to deliver content to the intended audience.
How do you do that? Neal Schaffer has some ideas.
To say Schaffer lives, eats and breathes social media is an understatement – he runs a social media blog, Maximize Social Business, provides social media consulting, co-founded the Social Media Tools Summit conference, has presented at over 200 conferences around the world and authored the book “Maximize Your Social: A One-Stop Guide to Building a Social Media Strategy for Marketing and Business Success.”
But Schaffer’s calling is helping other business owners use social media to grow their own business. He teaches at Rutgers University Business School’s Mini Social Media MBA Program and at the Irish Management Institute’s Digital Business Program. He is launching the Social Media Center of Excellence in the first quarter of this year to help even more people master social media. The monthly subscription membership program provides live content, resources and guidance that businesses need to create their own social media strategy.

What do you see as the biggest trend in social media in 2016?

Neal: Social media is now less revolutionary and more evolutionary. You are not going to see a lot of new things pop up, but more of an evolution of old things. However, trends like employee engagement and influencer marketing will get bigger and more mainstream.

While most every company is now on social media, not all of them are doing it well. What do you see as the biggest mistake content marketers make in terms of social media.

Neal: I think the biggest mistake is just copying or pasting the title of the blog post, eBook name or webinar title onto social media. It’s a “spray and pray” approach, but it just doesn’t work.

What should content marketers do instead of spray and pray?

Neal: When using social media content marketing, you should be doing A-B testing, using multiple variations of titles and repeatedly tweeting or posting. You also need to mix it up with different headlines and hooks because you never know what language is going to draw someone to your content.

Are there any other mistakes content marketers make in terms of social media?

Neal: Not using visuals is another huge mistake many companies are currently making. It will become more important for every [business to business] company to have a visual voice, which means using visuals in both content and social media.

What is the best piece of advice you can give content marketers about social media?

Neal: You need to think in terms of re-purposeability of content with social media, which content marketers are already used to doing. If I have a 20-minute podcast that’s maybe 2,000 words I can create three different blog posts out of it. I can create five different status updates per blog post. I have 15 different status updates, I can have an eBook, and infographic that I can use on both Pinterest and my website.
Extending that re-purposability to social media is I think the greatest tactical advice I can give that can really help content marketers.

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