November 1, 2014
By Maria Minsker, contributing writer

How to Create the Right Content for the Right Social Channel

for picking up on trends and gauging sentiment. "Twitter discussions tend to be more polarizing than conversations on other networks, and this is an important element for brands to consider. They like to know what their customers are thinking...what’s important to them," Hansell adds. To generate the rich conversation that Twitter is most known for, content should be timely and thought provoking.

Best practices across the board

With unique capabilities and strengths, each social channel requires a different set of best practices, but there are some guidelines that resonate with every network.

1) Identify Key Influencers: Finding the right people to propagate a brand's social media presence is crucial. A company such as Zoomph, an engagement platform provider, can help companies do just that by identifying influencers and leveraging their content from a marketing standpoint, sharing it on visual platforms, and pulling it into social hubs where other customers can easily see it and engage with it.

During the NBA playoffs earlier this year, Zoomph worked with the Washington Wizards team to generate excitement about their games and drive fan engagement on Twitter. By identifying political pundit Wolf Blitzer and rapper Wale as key influencers, who respectively have 34,057 and 2,215 Zpoints, an influence metric Zoomph uses, Zoomph helped the Wizards generate 1,210 tweets per minute during one game. "Retweeting and sharing content from influential fans of the team proved to be a very effective strategy for the Wizards," Amir Zonozi, Zoomph's chief strategy officer, says.

For B2B companies, engaging influencers requires a different approach. "In the B2B space, your employees are the biggest influencers, and giving them the tools they need to share your company's content easily could be one of the most effective social marketing moves you make," Michael Idinopulos, chief marketing officer at PeopleLinx, a social selling solution vendor, says.

In the financial services industry, for example, the opportunity for social marketing through LinkedIn is huge. According to a recent study from LinkedIn and FTI Consulting, 75 percent of financial advisors use social networks for business and 62 percent report that LinkedIn has helped them win new clients. Prudential Retirement Bank, however, was slow to adopt network use in the workforce, and turned to PeopleLinx for a solution.

PeopleLinx began as a LinkedIn training company, but has since evolved into a platform that helps companies create curated content for employees to share with their professional networks. The platform can also generate a list of social media tasks for employees, give them a way to quickly and easily execute those tasks, provide them with a learning module on social business strategies, and equip every member of an organization with either personal or management-level analytics to consistently track how social content is performing.

A few weeks after the company implemented PeopleLinx's platform, Prudential noticed a 190 percent increase in LinkedIn connections to intermediary partners (the company's main sales channel), a 117 percent increase in first-degree connections, and a 97 percent increase in profile marketability—the benchmark of a member's progression through customized tasks and activities, according to a company case study. "No one knows your company better than your employees," Idinopulos says, "so when you put that influence to use, it's very rewarding."

2) Measure Effectiveness: Finding ways to tie social engagement and vanity metrics, such as likes, retweets, or comments, to actual business value and revenue is also vital for marketing endeavors across all networks. While engagement metrics can be informative, evaluating the effect social media has on key performance indicators is the best way to measure business success, Enright-Schulz says.

Adobe client Conde Nast, for example, uses the vendor's social solutions to measure how social media posts are driving traffic to their owned and monetized content. "Conde Nast was primarily interested in high-value traffic, which is measured by a display of customer

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