7 Content and Social Media Marketing Myths, Refuted

Using social media to achieve your content marketing goals adds challenges as well as opportunities.

There are always new things to try, however, it is also easy to waste time and resources by going down blind alleys. Conducting research and knowing what your target audience wants are two of the well-known ways of enabling companies to create better marketing and content ideas. But with the rise in the number of platforms available to people, it can sometimes be confusing to decide what mode your content should be in.

While you can find great advice on many blogs, there is, unfortunately, a lot of misinformation. My monthly Windmill Networking column today – Lies My Content Marketing Expert Told Me – refutes some of the most common myths. I list them below, and urge you to go to the full article to read more.

1. Content is king
2. If it aint Viral, it ain’t worth a @##$%
3. You need an editorial calendar
4. You need to engage people with your content
5. Curation is a cure for the lazy blogger blues
6. The rise of social media means the end of inrterruption marketing

I will also add a very important one that I somehow neglected to include in my column:some say that blogging is dead or dying. I addressed this topic in detail in my post on Bulldog Reporter.

While the article is over a year old, I believe its conclusions are still valid. I provided data that shows the enduring importance of blogging, and advice for how to best leverage this form of online publshing. Here is an excerpt:

Blogging is proven technology that offers cheap and easy tools to publish longer articles to the open Web. PR teams and corporations can use these tools to communicate. Others can too, of course – for the better part of a decade, blogs have given rise to many new voices and drastically altered the media and influencer landscapes (witness the recent AOL acquisitions of TechCrunch and Huffington Post as just two examples, both of which assigned significant values to this form of media).

I believe that the most effective approach is to consider objectives, and the audiences you are trying to communicate with… Use blogs as one part of an integrated social media strategy. They can serve as an anchor for longer articles while Twitter and other tools can be the launch pad for quick, conversational updates.

Also, fellow Windmill Networking blogger Joel Don wrote about the topic more recently, in his great post: Time to Write off you Company Blog?