Welcome to “The Mailbag” a place where we take the best emails and questions that we receive each day about Digital, Social, Branding, Social Selling and Content Marketing and we share our thoughts to help Small and Medium Businesses build stronger online brands.
Question: I got into a disagreement with one of my supervisors that social media and content marketing aren’t the same. What is your take on this?
If I had to answer this question in a single sentence I would lean toward agreeing with whomever said, they are not the same. Having said that, I feel like an asterisk is required.
For all intents and purposes social media is a form of content marketing, but for most companies that are trying to deploy a content strategy social is merely a channel for distribution and contextualizing the content that they are creating as owned assets.
Technically speaking, a company could create all of their content assets on social channels and have their entire content strategy live on social media. I would also less technically speaking say that this would be dumb.
For most companies, the best way to think of social media vs. content marketing is to think of content as your story, ideas and useful information for your audience and to consider social media a place to share, contextualize, promote and amplify those ideas.
Most often I see companies miss the mark on social media because they create great content assets but they get lazy or short sighted when it comes to making the time to share the article.
For instance, I could write this piece (that you are reading) and then schedule to share it on social channels and there is a chance that some people would see it, read it and maybe even engage with it. Having said that, if I wanted a better return on the effort of creating content I may curate (read: put context around it) in a way that would provide more value to a potential reader in our social media networks.
