In social media we are told that it is all about the content. Content is King!
Content really is a large part of our success in social media, but it is not the only thing. We have to be clever about the content we create, how we create it, where we put it and most of all, how we promote it.
A common strategy in traditional marketing is to create a white paper. Usually this would be a report that would position a business in a favorable way while explaining a solution. So there would be “10 ways to choose a designer”, with all ten points showing how the company that sponsored the white paper is the ideal choice.
In the social media world this became an ebook or special report, and while the phrase “white paper” is less often used, they are pretty much the same thing. The difference tends to be in packaging and delivery.
In social media the appearance of the report will be more vibrant, more consumer-friendly. While the traditional white paper might be locked behind an opt-in form, the social media report would be free to download instantly, but with call to action to share the report widely through email and social tools.
This sharing causes a viral effect of visibility, and is a key way to get your message out to a wider audience.
Lately though people have taken it even further and taken the content out of the PDF and into the web site. Readers have a choice of reading directly online or downloading. This encourages immediate reading and skimming, and also allows people to link to key parts of the material.
If you have old ebooks and reports lying around, I suggest you consider repurposing the content this way.
What if you do not have the original document any longer? If your PDF is locked tight, you can extract the content with some online tools - there is even a PDF to Excel converter for extracting tabular data. You can use scribd.com to upload and share your PDF, and embed it in web pages using the handy online viewer.
Once you have your content up on the web and it is being shared, consider a Creative Commons license to encourage sharing within other webmasters sites. This will generate even more links and visibility, and people are going to scrape your content anyway so you might as well benefit from it!
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