5 things you can do in 5 minutes to boost your content

“I don’t have time for social media”. It’s a phrase I hear from business owners and marketing managers all the time.

And yes social media marketing CAN be time consuming. After all it’s a really important channel that should be given the same amount of time (and respect) that some of your other marketing channels (email, PPC, direct mail, SEO etc). It takes time to build up your communities, write and schedule your weekly social media posts, create images and other content, clean up your communities, analyse and measure your activity etc.

It also takes time to write blog posts, guides, news stories and articles for your website. Hopefully they will gain some organic traffic naturally (depending on a number of factors), but it really pays to give them a boost with some nice referral traffic…and this is where social media comes into play.

Before you say “but I don’t have time for that”, here are five things you can do to help increase the awareness and visibility of your content and they will only take you five minutes

1. Tweet it – in my experience this is one of the quickest ways to get some visibility and some instant clicks. Craft your tweet to be short and sweet, add a relevant hashtag or two and if you have time also @ mention people or brands that you think will be interested in it
2. Pin those images – Pinterest isn't just for people creating their fantasy interior designs. If you've used images or video in your content then pin these to relevant boards. Make sure you've added a good caption to them to help with discoverability too
3. Facebook friends – if you've got a business page then that’s the logical place, but even sharing with other relevant group or pages is worth doing, plus posting on your own timeline (even if you use Facebook for non-business content there is bound to be at least one friend interested)
4. LinkedIn love – share the content on your Company page, plus via your own profile. And when you have more than five minutes to spare then why not create a published post like this to give more detail around the subject or from a different angle?
5. G+ Communities – whole the jury may be out still on whether Google+ can drive traffic, there are quite a few active ‘communities’ that you can share your content in. Plus there’s the potential that your new content will get indexed quicker on Google, as by posting it you’re giving them a heads-up on a new URL to crawl

Don’t forget to add UTM tagging to your URLS first too, so you can then measure the effectiveness of them within Google Analytics at a later stage (I’ve written about why that’s really important already). This might seem time-consuming, but use the Chrome extension ‘Google Analytics URL Builder’ and it’s a piece of cake.

Now the list above will depend on you having a social presence on these platforms, but if not then there are lots more quick and easy ways to promote your content.

And of course if you have more than five minutes then you you've got an even better chance of getting that referral traffic flowing.