When to Post Your Content Only on Social Media and When Not, What Marketers Need to Know

The topics of using social media and social networks were actualized at the moment when the so-called distributed content has emerged. From the classic model of creating and distributing news through online content distribution, we have reached distributed content.

For some time now, online news distribution hasn’t been a problem:

• It’s clear that if you want greater visibility of content, it needs to be promoted/distributed through social networks and/or social media.
• The work of journalists on the Internet doesn’t end with the creation of content, but that content needs to be distributed through social networks and social media.
• Every social network has its own rules, and in relation to that, certain effects of online distribution can be expected.

As time goes on, more and more companies know how to better adapt certain content to a particular online communication channel with the basic goal of using that communication channel as a tool to attract users to their own website (blog, Facebook page, etc.).

The growing popularity of Instagram is an indicator of a new trend whose understanding begins with the question: “How do I bring a user to one of my media over which I have control (website, blog, Facebook page) via an image on Instagram?“

If you use Instagram, you know that you can post an image from this service on other communication channels but you can’t post a link to one of your media on Instagram until you reach the magic figure of 10,000 followers and become a business profile.

This is where the story of what we want to write about in our article begins…

Facebook Notes Instead of a Blog on Your Site?

Should you use, for example, only Facebook Notes instead of a blog on your website or a special domain?

It’s known that if you post a video material directly on Facebook, it will have much higher visibility on that platform, compared to, let’s say, the shared YouTube video. A similar thing happens when you create a special post on the updated and improved Facebook Notes system to create longer posts.

A few years ago, various platforms offered the possibility of publishing your content on social media itself as an attempt to keep users of these social media on their platform, instead of users going to the websites of media and companies by clicking on links. Depending on the target groups, the engagement of the media, or companies on these social media - individual social media brings them more or fewer benefits.

Benefits and Disadvantages of Posting Content Solely on Social Media

Let’s stick to Facebook Notes for a bit more. Enabling this feature makes it easy for you to make some infographics, to embed, etc. It’s quite similar to the new WordPress Gutenberg editor, with numerous options on what to add. It’s pretty useful and interesting.

The bottom line - it’s quite nifty to use Notes to your advantage.  Given that it appears in feeds of your page’s fans, you can truly reach more people than before. As we said, all social media, including Facebook, are more likely to share what you put on Notes than your link taking people off the platform.

What are the main benefits of using Facebook Notes for marketers:

• Better chances of reaching your fans
• More formatting and richer media posts
• Can be shared, commented, and liked just like any post

Marketers have several simple strategies at the disposal using Facebook Notes to maximize their potential:

• Writing a full blog post
• Summarizing a blog post and linking to it
• Adding a Notes tab to their pages
• Linking to several topical posts on their websites
• Promoting products, affiliate links, and email lists
• Adding business information
• Pinning important notes to the top of their pages’ feeds

Looking at all the above written, a logical question arises: If an individual social media brings us a lot of benefits, should we completely move to create content for that social media, given that neither companies nor media have unlimited resources to create content adapted to different platforms that are current today?

In short, the answer to the question of whether you should just share the content you create through social media or publish it there lies in the company’s defined goals regarding the creation and distribution of content. In other words, what all you want to achieve with that content, and in what way?

Here are some recommendations that suggest why content posting shouldn’t be done solely on such platforms, either social media like Facebook or online publishing platforms like Medium:

• Inability to track the top of the sales funnel, and consequently the ROI
• Insufficient building of brand authority
• Impossibility to place various content due to technical limitations on social media
• Too simple and rigid call-to-action button on social media
• Total separation from the brand’s website

It has always been important to make a distinction between one’s own media over which the company has complete control (website, blog...) and social media accounts where it’s not possible to follow all the data that can affect, for example, to improve sales of products and services. Another problem with company accounts on social media is that they can be subject to blocking or shutting down by the owner of that social media. That is, you don’t own that account, you just use it.

The most important problem of publishing content on platforms that aren’t owned by companies is that this content becomes obsolete much faster on those platforms (with the exception of YouTube) than is the case with companies’ websites and blogs.

When posting texts on Facebook Notes, there’s an additional problem that they aren’t visible on search engines and, if they are ever visible on search engines, they will have a similar “lifespan“ as is usually the case on Facebook (Google tracks users’ interest in certain content that’s visible on Google for a limited time - as is the case with most daily news).

What’s the Purpose of Distributing Your Content in Relation to Your Company’s Goals?

Let’s get back to start: What’s the purpose of distributing your content in relation to your company’s goals, that is, why do you create individual types of content at all?

In the case of the media, if there’s enough interest to publish individual content only for social media - then there’s a logic to that: increasing media visibility (such as video on Facebook itself), profit-sharing with the platform (YouTube), or commercial (charged) message as part of the content itself, which is promoted by publishing on social media.

For example, there are contents that already contain a commercial message, which increases the visibility of the commercial message by publishing it directly on media accounts from various social media.

However, in the case of companies, the problem arises when there’s a sales process that ends on the website. In such cases, it’s appropriate for companies to add content for social media only in cases when these contents are informative, i.e. when they aren’t directly related to the sales process (contents that are adjusted to the stage of considering buying a product or service - before making a purchase decision).

Google Amp Project Solves the Problem

For now, the Google AMP project is perhaps the best solution to the problem of distributed content on social media.

The explanation for the phenomenon of creating content for individual platforms by users lies in the problem of the speed of loading of various web pages that users link, especially in the case of mobile use of the Internet and social media applications. They run incomparably faster than most servers that host linked web pages.

This implies that it’s of utmost importance to set up a website by choosing a builder that offers everything you need in terms of site building aspects, find a quality web hosting that is to, above all, speed up your website or blog to which links go.

Since 5 years ago, Google has enabled the appearance of mobile pages created with open-source technology - Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) - in search results, which will enable websites that adopt this technology to load much faster on mobile platforms.

What Did AMP bring?

This initiative has been supported from the outset by a number of large companies, including Twitter and Pinterest. Acceleration on the mobile platforms of these pages is achieved by the fact that these pages will be specially cached by Google on its servers and thus, speed them up as much as possible for reading on mobile phones.

The adoption of this technology was accelerated by the fact that AMP pages on websites were positioned better on Google compared to similar websites that weren’t optimized in this way.

This has led to the fact that the problem of creating content for certain platforms is reduced only to the essential and necessary creation of such content due to promotional effects (mostly on Facebook), in the previously explained way, and that the cause of the problem (slow loading of web pages on mobile platforms) will be solved on the company’s websites themselves and not on some other platforms.