Skip to main

Get More Bait in the Water

Authors: Jay Baer Jay Baer
Posted Under: Content Marketing
Listen to this Article

How can you catch more fish? By using more poles.

social media fishingIf you’re going to create social media content to establish or perpetuate thought leadership for you, your company, or your clients, you can’t silo your ideas.

The old method of thought leadership was to create a white paper. A carefully crafted, highly edited, incredibly boring, 18-page tree killer that you provided for download on your Web site.

Guess what? In a 140-character world, a white paper feels like reading Moby Dick. Backwards. While covered in maple syrup.

Mmmmm. Info Snacks

Don’t put all your thought leadership eggs in that one, large basket. Like a salad at a fancy restaurant, deconstruct that white paper and instead create an array of info snacks that you can sprinkle across the Web.

Each of those snacks will be consumed by a slightly different audience, and perhaps more importantly each will be indexed by search engines, multiplying your inbound marketing opportunities geometrically.

Let’s think about how this might work in practice. Let’s say your core concept is that Blue Cross/Blue Shield in your state is helping improve the health of the citizenry through community health initiatives like immunization, exercise classes, and so forth.

Sure, you could create a report and a press release that talks about the good works of BCBS. You could probably even get a reporter to write about it in the local paper, or the TV station to grab some footage of the line for flu shots. But that’s not “atomizing” content (in the words of Todd Defren from Shift Communications). That’s siloing content.

Instead, you could create:

  • A blog post about how immunizations work, and whether there’s a danger of injecting people with live virus.
  • A blog post about the effectiveness of immunizations in controlling infectious disease.
  • A blog post about the history of immunization.
  • A blog post that compares the impacts and benefits of various types of exercise (aerobic vs. anaerobic, etc.)
  • A blog post that reviews equipment you might need in BCBS exercise classes like fitness balls, yoga mats, steps.
  • A “biggest loser” style contest in major cities in your state, including weekly blog posts, Facebook page, and videos of weigh-ins.
  • A video blog post (also on YouTube) interviewing an immunization nurse and discussing the craziest/funniest things he/she has seen (good for humanization).
  • A video blog post (also on YouTube) showing scenes from an exercise class, and interviewing participants.
  • A weekly podcast that features discussions with fitness instructors about easy fitness tips that consumers can do at home.
  • A Powerpoint or Keynote presentation (uploaded to Slideshare) that covers the history of immunization and its importance in modern public health.

This doesn’t even begin to exhaust the options, and doesn’t include content on Wikipedia, Google KnolHunchSquidoo, or blog comments.

Thought leadership via social media content is about thinking big. And then thinking small.

Are you ready to fish?

(photo by Laszlo-Photo)

Article Banner Image

Get our best tips. Join the smartest marketers who receive our twice monthly update.

Join the Social Pros LinkedIn Community

Join a community of real social pros doing social media on LinkedIn. Receive all the inspiration and ideas straight to your feed and add your thoughts to the conversation.

Follow Social Pros on LinkedIn

Subscribe to Social Pros Podcast

b2b influencer

Ready to Get Started?

I am looking for...

(Required)