Your content marketing strategy is at the core of your social media marketing strategy. Without content you don’t have anything to use to market on social media; without social media you don’t have a good way to get your content noticed quickly. Therefore, content marketing and social media marketing go hand in hand.

Content marketing is a tactic used to inform, educate and entertain. When used in conjunction with social media content, it is also used to interact with your audience. Social media includes social networks, message boards, forums, as well as blogs with opened commenting. By combing the two you can increase your traffic, leads and sales. To see a good result from your efforts, you need to have a plan in place, and be able to follow that plan.

If you are having issues with following your social media and content marketing plans, you may have an issue with time. If you truly want to expand your efforts, there are some things you can do right now to help.

1) Hire Help

That right, you can outsource most of what you do in social media. Someone else can share relevant content with your audience while you focus on important comments to make it more personal. You can also outsource most of your content needs. Someone can ghost write your blog posts, articles, and even message board posts. You can focus on keeping the discussion alive by commenting in real time.

2) Get Active

You may be spending so much time handling customer service issues that you don’t have time to get involved. Outsource customer service, and get busy being interactive with your social networks. The more active you are, the more trust you’ll build and the more shares, likes, and interaction you’ll get.

3) Use Sponsored Updates

Sponsored posts (Facebook.com), sponsored updates (LinkedIn.com), promoted tweets (Twitter.com), etc… should be used to promote your brand. The best use of sponsored updates is to use them to lead people to powerful content that has a strong call to action – especially a “sign up now” action rather than a “buy now” action. If you can use sponsored posts to capture more email addresses, you’ll be able to market to those people a little easier.

4) Increase the Forms Your Content Takes

You have photos, videos, podcasts, eBooks, articles, blog posts and more to choose from. Use a variety of different forms of content in order to make the shares you post on social media more exciting. No one wants to look endlessly at just text, and no one can listen to and watch video all the time, so mix it up.

5) Get Everyone Involved

Anyone on your team can help you increase and expand social media and content marketing to new heights. You don’t have to leave it only to the marketing manager. With good training and guidelines everyone can make updates in the name of the company, answer discussion points, and write or plan content for blogs, articles, eBooks, reports and so forth.

Expand your content sharing on social media and your interaction on your blog and on social media by sharing the load. This will work to increase awareness of your business, boost traffic, and sales without running you into the ground.