Don’t Forget the Channel in Your Content and Social Media Strategies

If your company is like most, you are producing lots and lots of content. Hopefully, some of it gets used on your company's Social Media pages like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Have you ever thought about how you can share your content with your partners to provide valuable posting material for their Social Media outlets? 

Think of the potential reach if your partner channel uses your content on their LinkedIn or Facebook pages! If each of your partners has only 100 followers or connections, your message reach can increase significantly for each partner leveraging your content! That’s a lot of value for you and your partners since most of them are probably participating in Social Media but may not have the resources to generate regular content.

Here are a few ideas to get started leveraging content across your partner channel:

1. Survey your partners: Determine the extent of their participation in Social Media -- you’ll be surprised by their participation. At the same time you can ask them how often they post and how they generate content.
2. Identify Content Sources: If you haven’t already done so, determine all the internal and external sources of content for your program. Potential sources include PR, technical information and trends, Analyst information, partner and customer newsletters, case studies, Webinar invitations and content, blog postings and whitepapers.
3. Make sure your content reflects your partners’ perspective: Determine what content can be positioned from a partner or distributor point of view – that is what might be important for the partners to share on their pages and with their customers. If you have a newsletter that you send to partners start there. Suggest in your newsletter that partners should share appropriate content on their Social Media pages.  

Ultimately, sharing your content for use by your partner on Social Media should help provide a new outlet for branding, gaining mindshare and providing more value from your partner program. As far as results tracking, don’t think of it as demand generation but track it like you do PR, press releases and Web page views. 

For more information about starting, integrating and improving your partner or marketing programs, contact Larry Fournier on LinkedIn or by email at: fourthman@usa.com.