Social media isn’t everyone’s best friend, contrary to popular belief. It’s regarded as surprisingly ‘Marmite’ and is arguably both the biggest opportunity and the most troubling threat for marketers and publishers since the birth of the internet - perhaps even since the birth of the telephone.

Living so much of our lives online, we regular folk can now watch ads, enjoy editorial and comment on just about anything, all in real time. Once, we were blissfully passive consumers, willingly receiving a stream of messages brought to us via mass media; now, we have the power to make or break ads or content, simply by hitting a ‘like’ or ‘share’ button.

Anyone who doubts the power of social media to deliver a body blow to a brand only need look at some of the biggest marketing own goals of 2014 – like US pizza company DiGiorno, which contributed the comment “You had pizza” to #WhyIStayed, without stopping to think that the discussion was all about why women remained in abusive relationships.

Social media optimisation is a critical part of a modern content management system, and if you want your CMS to be fit for purpose it will have social media sharing capabilities built in, so that commenting on and sharing ads, videos, music and words is effortless.

Obviously, that also means you’re bestowing upon readers the power to share things they don’t like – but you can’t separate love and hate and, as Marmite knows, sometimes the haters are just as valuable at promoting your brand as the lovers.

But maximising the power of social media is about more than just making it easy for people to share. A modern CMS also needs to be constantly monitoring the social media traffic that a piece of content generates and use that information to update, evolve and refine the content.

You should look for a platform that collects sharing statistics from the most popular social networks not only to understand how social media integration is performing but use that data to update accompanying links and suggestions for other content the viewer might be interested in. Digging into the raw data can give a genuine understanding of what issues are trending right now.

As an example, take the xoJane.com homepage. Part of the homepage is made up of articles automatically selected based on the traction they are getting on Facebook and Twitter. The idea is to detect articles that are popular on social media and help new visitors to the site discover those articles as well.

Creating ‘viral content’ has to be about more than just putting up stuff that people want to share and then walking away. The internet is all about interactivity and creating conversations with people, and that means listening to them and talking to them (as opposed to talking at them).

The internet ended the mass broadcast era and led to the fragmentation of media channels. Simultaneously, it put control into the hands of ordinary citizens. Social media has accelerated that process.

But we, as an industry, can do much more than simply live with this new paradigm. We can harness the possibilities of social media and use what people are saying, doing and sharing as part of a feedback loop to improve our content, make it even more compelling – and drive even more comment, which we can inject back into our system and our sites.

 

By Carla Faria, Director of Solutions (UK & Canada) at Say Media. 

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