Social media platforms and their algorithms have evolved over the years — but too many marketers and organizations have not evolved along with them. That’s led to some false assumptions in marketers’ minds about how to improve social media consistency, cadence, distribution, and effectiveness.

This guide will unveil five strategic approaches to your social media content distribution that will expand your visibility and connection with your audience.

After this article, you’ll have the information you need to improve how your content budget allocates funds to your social media budget, ensuring every dollar you spend contributes to your reach and engagement.

5 Effective Social Media Content Distribution Strategies

Let’s take a progressive approach. We’ll start with the more straightforward and cost-effective options, then we’ll advance to some more sophisticated strategies. But don’t worry, each approach can dramatically increase your reach.

Engaging with social media audience

1. Engage with your social media audience

It sounds simple, but directly engaging with your audience on social can lead to higher visibility. Your brand’s authenticity will be judged by the way you interact with people responding to your posts or asking questions in the comments section or your DMs.

Not only is it a great way to showcase how your brand connects with people through conversation, but social platforms have algorithms in place to highlight content that actively engages more individuals.

What you think might be a simple response from your brand to a single consumer could actually be seen by many — particularly if the comment garners additional likes or comments from others.

If you want to take those responses to the next level and multiply their impact, it’s all about speed (aka. responding quickly).

A Sprout Social study shows that almost 70 percent of consumers expect a brand to respond to them within the same day. Also, 63 percent of consumers agree that that their brand loyalty is significantly influenced by the quality of service they provide on social media.

Organic social media reach is always the easiest to achieve when your potential social media audience decides to come to your account directly.

If users feel confident they will receive a response from you, it’s more likely they will view your content while leaving a comment. If a user has little or no faith their comment will ever be seen or will receive a reply, they may not view your content at all.

So if you employ this approach, make sure to ask yourself – “Are we responding fast enough?”

2. Repurpose and reuse old content

Before we discuss the concept of repurposing as part of your social media content distribution strategy, first consider the following:

Considering those numbers, it’s likely that most of your audience will never see your organic content. That’s why repurposing and publishing existing content can be effective on those platforms. It’s most likely that your audience never saw the original content in the first place.

But repurposing doesn’t necessarily mean publishing the same content on the same channels in the same ways. Some of the best-repurposed content reimagines content in different ways for different channels while ensuring the core of the message or creative element still shines through.

Some of the ways your brand might repurpose content include:

  • Share the exact same piece of content more than once. As we said earlier, most people will never see the organic post you recently shared. This means that your organic Facebook post from six months ago can easily be shared again today since most of your audience never saw it in the first place.
  • Use videos in reimagined ways on separate channels. A video originally developed as a long-form piece of content for YouTube could be cut in different ways for other channels — including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
  • Take a look at the questions people are asking on social media. Then take a look at your responses. Often, you have already developed content in those responses that can curated and shared more broadly as posts or stories.

If you want to dive deeper into more social media benchmarks by industry, this Hootsuite article does a great job.

Trying niche channels and delivery tools

3. Explore niche channels and delivery tools

Yes, Facebook is the largest social media network, with YouTube not far behind. That means there’s a lot of competition on both platforms. It’s possible you may find more value in reaching people with your social media content by focusing specifically on the audience you want to reach and identifying where they’re spending their time outside the major social platforms. For example:

  • Facebook Groups: Let’s assume your company has a product that will be particularly beneficial for a specific group of people. You often can publish the same content you publish on your Facebook page within a Facebook group. You do not have to be the person who created the group in order to publish in many types of groups on Facebook. If your company develops tools, some of the Facebook groups in which you can publish content and engage with people about your tools include “Construction Pros,” “Building Construction,” or “Home Decor and DIY On a Budget.”
  • Medium: If your company is looking for opportunities to promote thought leadership within your industry, Medium might be an out-of-the-box option. The popular site allows for longer-form content that is distributed to audiences you might not normally reach on your traditional social media channels.
  • Industry-specific social media platforms: ActiveRain is a social media community largely for those who work in the real estate industry. Behance is a social network for creative professionals. Sermo is a healthcare social media platform. You may not want to create content specifically for ActiveRain Behance, Sermo, or other similar social platforms, but if you work in specific industries, some of the content you develop for other platforms very well may work well here, too.

4. Boost existing posts

The early days of the existence of any social media platform seem to yield the best opportunities for marketers to reach people with content organically. However, as time goes on and algorithms become more sophisticated, your ability to reach followers organically with your content decreases.

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are all examples of social platforms that retired chronological timelines in favor of an interest-based timeline determined by algorithms.

As we mentioned earlier in this article, you won’t reach the vast percentage of your followers on social media if you simply rely on organic posting. The good news is that you can use boosting tactics and techniques to enhance your outcomes.

If you plan to develop a strategy to boost your Facebook posts to improve your social media content distribution, consider the following:

  • Associate a goal with your boosted posts. Obviously, a boosted post will allow more people to see your content. However, you also can choose specific goals to align with your boosted posts. For example, you can use a boosted post to get more eyes on a recent video or to facilitate more messages and chats.
  • Boost posts that are performing well organically. You will get more bang for your buck by boosting posts already performing well. No matter how much money you spend on a boosted post, you can’t buy yourself into relevancy if the content isn’t engaging organically.
  • Consider boosting different types of posts. Evergreen posts often perform well when boosted, but you should not boost evergreen posts exclusively. Try boosting some posts that are more timely as well. Also, consider how boosted videos perform compared to boosted photos, links, or other types of content.
  • Know your audience options. Boosting a post allows you to be more deliberate in identifying the audiences you most want to reach. You can target boosted posts on Facebook by location, demographics, behavior, interests, and connections.

Strategy for ad spending

5. Develop ad spend strategies

Some brands have embraced the idea that social media is a pay-to-play medium and that organic reach isn’t what it once was. For example, Nike focuses much more on ads than on organic content.

It dark posts most of these ads. In fact, the brand has bought in so much to social media ads that it can go months (or years) without publishing an organic post on its Facebook account.

Apple employs a similar tactic on Facebook, opting to use the social media behemoth as an ad platform rather than a platform for organic reach.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and virtually all other social media platforms have robust advertising tools.

These tools allow brands and organizations to reach social media users with content in ways that are much more cost-effective than continuing to develop and publish new organic content day after day.

When developing your social media ad spend strategies, consider the following:

  • Develop your ads for different people. The beauty of ads is that they can be precisely targeted to different groups. If you publish the same social media ad for an 18-year-old male student in California and a 72-year-old retired female in Maine, you probably aren’t thinking through your content creation with optimized distribution in mind.
  • Focus on one call to action. It can be tempting to include a couple of different calls to action, but doing so will simply create confusion for your intended audiences.
  • Keep your ads short and valuable. There are no guarantees that anybody is going to stick with your social ads very long, so clearly communicate your value quickly in the copy or video.
  • Test your ads against themselves. A/B test your ads to see which most resonate with your target audiences. Once you know which ads perform best, focus on the distribution of the ads that are most likely to reach your audiences.

Want Better Content For Your Social Media?

No matter what strategic approach you choose for your social media distribution, you still need one thing – great social media content. That’s where we at ClearVoice have you covered. Our expert social media writers and editors can craft any type of social content you need when you need it. Talk to a content specialist today to see how we can maximize your social reach and impact.