How To Use Social Media Automation To Dramatically Boost Your Efficiency With Christin Kardos From Convince and Convert [AMP 065]
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- Information about Convince and Convert and what Christin does there.
- Evergreen content: What it is and how to leverage it to your advantage.
- How you can tweak and update your content to make it rank for certain keywords.
- Best practices when it comes to sharing previously published content.
- What content curation is and how Christin handles it at Convince and Convert.
- Thoughts on balancing your own content and others’ content, as well as why it’s important to focus on quality first and foremost.
- The benefits and potential downfalls of social media automation.
- Christen’s best advice for marketers wanting to get started with automation and reposting content.
- “Rule number one is if it’s not good, don’t share it.”
- “We focus on the “and therefore...” aspect when we share content... there are others who are actually the newsbreakers.”
- “Being useful is the best thing you can do.”
How To Use Social Media Automation To Dramatically Boost Your Efficiency With Christin Kardos From Convince and Convert
Click To TweetTranscript:
Nathan: Sharing your best content again on social media is the best practice. After all those page views that keep rolling in, those social media posts your followers continue to share, and those conversions on that content are like gold that suggest your audience loves it. Whether it’s new or old, share that same incredible content again. Am I right? You might be wondering what the best practices look like for that kind of social sharing strategy. That’s why you and I are chatting with Christin Kardos. She’s the social media and community manager at Convince & Convert, which by the way has been rated the number one content marketing blog in the world according to Content Marketing Institute. They definitely got a lot of things figured out over there. Today on the Actionable Marketing Podcast, you are going to learn about evergreen content, how you can capitalize on its incredible opportunities within your social sharing mix, and how social media automation may be just what you need to use your time and resources as effectively as possible. I’m Nathan from CoSchedule. It’s time for us to check in with Christin. Hey Christin, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Christin: Hi Nathan, I’m so excited to talk to you today. Nathan: Like I said, I’m pumped to have you. We know you work at Convince & Convert. Tell me about that, what you guys are doing over there? Christin: What are we not doing, Nathan? That’s really the better question. Lots of things going on over at Convince & Convert. Some of you may know Jay Baer. He’s our president and our fearless leader. The business itself has a few different forms. Most of the people on the team work on consulting. We’re not an agency. We are councilors giving strategic digital marketing counsel to big brands. That’s a large part of what Convince & Convert does. But what you might be more familiar with is our media side. That is the area where I work with the digital magazine, aka the blog. We have several podcasts that we produce and a lot of content going out on a regular basis. My role is to help share that content on the organic side of social media. Nathan: The last time we chatted, obviously we’re talking about social media, but you mentioned a key piece of your strategy at Convince & Convert involves publishing that evergreen content. Fill me in on what that is for you guys. Christin: We do get a lot of website traffic, a lot of podcast downloads, a lot of blog readership. But we find a good chunk of that comes from a select few pieces of content. Some of them actually go back several years. What we’re finding is that these pieces of content are still answering questions that people are looking for. They might be googling and putting in the search criteria and these particular “evergreen pieces of content” are coming up. We’re finding that they’re still quite useful. Rather than set it and forget it, with all the content that we have coming out, we have several new posts and podcast episodes every single week, we still find that those older, highly valuable pieces of content are getting a lot of eyeballs onto our website and giving us a lot of good connections. We don’t want to let them go idle. We don’t want to discount their value even though they may be older. We continue to share those on social and get new content ideas from them as well. Nathan: Do you have some examples of evergreen stuff or what that actually looks like? Christin: Yeah. I do have one really fun one. Dear listener, Nathan does not know I’m going to mention this one. One of our best performing pieces of content ever is one that you wrote, Nathan. It’s called 105 Types of Content to Fill Up Your Editorial Calendar. That particular post, I can’t remember exactly how old it is, but it is getting eyeballs every week because people are googling ideas for their editorial calendar and this particular post is coming up. Time on page is really good because they’re looking and they’re seeing templates and actionable ideas for their editorial calendar. That’s just one example. We have others. Posts about statistics tend to do really well. One of our really topnotch posts and it’s from earlier this year is one that Jay wrote about podcasts statistics. We’re getting tons and tons of hits on that because people are so interested in the idea of podcasting and considering using it for their businesses and so on. Nathan: Thanks for the shout-out. Actually, I have a question around the evergreen stuff then for you. Do you guys ever look back at those posts and just optimize them again, like redo certain things to continue to rank for those keywords? Christin: Yeah. I don’t get huge into content strategy for the blog. But I can tell you based on my tribal knowledge that what we’ll do is a lot of times we’ll go back and make update. The fundamentals there in the post might still be applicable but maybe there’s some new technology or tools, and therefore angle to it. We tend to leave those posts as they are. We don’t want to clickbait or switch anything out but we might link to here’s an updated idea or set of tips around this concept. If let’s say next year there’s 200 types of content to fill up your content calendar, we might ask you to come back and write a new post about that and we might link to it from the old post. Nathan: Nice. It makes perfect sense and actually leads into the next question I have for you. Since you’re working more on that sharing side, what are some of the ways that you are maximizing that evergreen content at Convince & Convert? How do you continue to promote it then? Christin: Really, it’s quite simple, we’re just re-sharing it on organic social. Occasionally, we might even put ad dollars behind it if we see an outlier. But primarily it’s just actually re-sharing that same piece of content again. It’s really interesting to see that some of these evergreen shares are actually some of our top performing organic social posts as well. It’s not just getting interest from people who are searching, say it be at Google, but people are actually drawn to it in organic Twitter, organic Facebook. We might take the same piece of content and just share it with different intertexts or different photo or share it on a weekend versus a weekday, that kind of thing. Nathan: Since you’re re-promoting your evergreen content on social media all the time, could you tell me about a few of the best practices that you found that work really well for you guys? Christin: Sure. There are a lot of different opinions on this topic. But we just feel like rule number one is if it’s not good, don’t share it. We try to strive for quality over quantity. We don’t have an exact we want to share a certain number of times per day, per network, or anything like that. We just try to put our best foot forward with what we’re sharing. In sharing evergreen content, we mix it in with our new content and other curated content from other sources. We try not to share too much to the point where it feels spammy.
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