Don’t worry; this isn’t going to be one of those tedious discussions about how embracing social media changes your marketing strategy from talking at someone to conversing with them.  Nor is it going to wax poetic about the virtues of being engaged online or the frightening pitfalls of not monitoring what others are saying about your company. While all those statements are true, this discussion focuses on the bottom line benefits of social media and its ability to enhance overall marketing communications efforts.

Fortunately, most organizations have a wealth of informative and valuable content and as we all know – content is king. The good news is that your organization probably has an archive of newsletters, news releases, news articles, white papers, videos, feature stories and other content that would be of great interest to various social media groups.  Much of this information was probably used once for specific purposes and then relegated to that vast electronic storehouse you call your website.  And even if you don’t have a wealth of content, your trade magazine and association partners certainly do have a wealth of content you can use.

Thanks to social media, you now have a variety of new opportunities and new audiences that would be very interested in seeing this information for the first time.   Regardless of what type of business you are in, you can find and/or form groups within LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter that are interested in your white paper or see your training video on a specific topic.  You can take advantage of this marketing opportunity in five easy steps:

1) Identify specific content on your site and your key partners’ sites’ and establish an Industry Resource Center

2) Organize, edit and/or adapt it as necessary

3) Identify the various existing social media groups and form your own groups that would be interested in this information

4) Develop a strategy and editorial schedule for posting this information on the various sites

5) Create a strategy for converting these new audiences into customers when they visit your website.

Not only will your new resource center reinforce your company’s leadership role, it can drive significant traffic to your website.  However, it also makes you think more strategically when planning and creating future marketing tools.  When you are developing your next news release, white paper or video, you need to think how can it be focused and/or adapted for use with social media.  Should you be making your videos shorter so they fit within the two-minute limit on Facebook?  You should be thinking about how longer videos could be edited down for social media sites. The same holds true of news releases and white papers.  Are you using the right keywords that will be found on the search engines?

As these brief examples illustrate, taking advantage of these new social media opportunities makes all of us better strategic marketers.  What are your thoughts?