3 Ways Creative, PR, and Digital Agencies Should Use Social Media to Build Your Business

I was at a party for the fall faculty of the Columbia University strategic communication program, and it was fun because not only am I teaching there this fall, but I am also a graduate of the masters program. As a graduate myself, the executive director of the program, asked me what I valued most from my time in the program. My answer was learning from my extraordinary peers who are now at brands ranging from the NFL to Under Armour to Thomson Reuters.

Peer-to-peer learning is valuable beyond school though. As an agency owner and a consultant, I often find that my conversations with other entrepreneurs and marketers challenge me and teach me new ways to think about my work.

It’s with that in mind that I was so pleased to be invited to speak at a round-table for agency owners last week. I focused on how social media and content marketing can help agencies build their business, and I hope these lessons are valuable for you as well.

Empower your team

First, help your team to optimize their social media profiles (Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, etc.) for their roles and expertise areas. Not only does it help them to be more credible to your clients, but it also helps them to make better connections within the industry. Help them pair up and do peer critiques of each others’ profiles to make sure they include relevant keywords for your industry. Again, it benefits your firm, and it benefits your employees as they grow in their careers.

Support your team in finding and curating good content to share on social media. Not every social channel has to be used for business purposes, but your team members should be using at least LinkedIn (and possibly Twitter) to share their thought leadership. Tools like AndersPink and Klout can help your team members to find useful articles to share.

Share relevant company content with your team regularly. Not only should that content help your team to stay connected with company happenings, but tools like Bambu and SocialChorus can make it easy for your team to amplify your company content through their own social networks.

Create pathways for your potential clients

Content that helps to deepen your understanding of your clients’ needs gives you the tools to have better conversations. Similarly, content that helps your clients help themselves makes them trust you more. By engaging in social listening, using landing pages that employ quizzes, and using Facebook and Twitter polls, you can learn about your potential clients and feed that back into your email automation system or sales pipeline to be more relevant to your clients. Tools like Interact are easy to use and highly engaging. Use its quizzes as landing pages where you can drive traffic from social media (both paid and organic).

Agencies like Bliss Integrated do a great job of creating “choose your own adventure” sequences on their websites, and companies like Hubspot provide great blog content in specific verticals. Know your audience’s needs and show them just what’s valuable to them.

Get more out of your content

To feed your social media channels, you need good backbone content. Content like podcasts, webinars, videos, and ebooks showcase your expertise. They’re useful for your team to send to current and prospective clients, and they’re great to share with other experts in your network.

Each piece of backbone content should be turned into at least 8 pieces of social media content (quote graphics, infographics, teaser videos, slideshows, etc.) that can be packaged for your individual social channels. This allows you to atomize your message and spread the word about your backbone content.

With these three legs, your social media program will help you to build your reputation, engage with your clients, and build thought leadership, in order to drive more leads and more sales.

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