Facebook, Pinterest, & Instagram are the big three social networks, though Pinterest is more of a search engine. Chances are your audience is on one, if not all of these, platforms. And if you want to build traffic, you want to be where your audience is.

Did you know that 81 percent of Americans have social media profiles, and over 1.96 billion active users are currently using social media worldwide? It’s clear that using social media to get traffic to your website or blog is a must for anyone who wants to get noticed and/or earn money online.

Social media marketing, while effective, is a lot of work especially if you’re trying to reinvent the wheel. Thankfully, you really don’t have to. Instead, you can do what is shown to work and work well. In fact, each social network practically tells you in their help files exactly how to use their platform to get the best results.

You can lessen the work you need to do by realizing that when it comes to creating content for social media you can use content you’ve already created and repurpose it for use on social media with very few tweaks. It doesn’t have to be hard.

For example, change the title, change out the images, extract quotes from the content, address a problem your audience has from a different angle using the original content as research and so on. The ideas are endless!

When you realize that you can reuse and repurpose content you’ve already created for social media content you’ll get a lot more out of social media marketing without a lot more work.

To get started on the right foot, you’ll need to define your goals and find your content. Let’s get started!

Define Your Goals And Find Your Content

Regardless of which social media platform you plan to focus on, Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram, you’ll need to set goals, then locate the content that will help you meet those goals. To accomplish this task, ask yourself the following questions.

• Who is your audience? – This must always be the first question you ask yourself before defining goals or making any decisions about your strategy and tactics.
• What are their pain points? – What makes your audience members tick? What keeps them up at night? What solutions do you offer them for these pain points?
• What do you want this traffic to accomplish? – Do you want them to sign up for your email newsletter, download a freebie, or convert to a paying customer by purchasing something?
• What do you want them to do when they hit your site? – This is a big question, once you get them to click through, what will they see that helps them make the decision that you want them to make?

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When you can determine your objectives for your audience it’s going to be a lot simpler if you know the answers to these questions. Knowing those answers will help you weed through your products, services, offerings, and the content you already have so that you can determine whether it can be repurposed to accomplish your goals.

If not, you may need to fill in the gaps with new content that you create or you pay someone to create.

Once you find the content you want to repurpose you’ll want to ensure that you freshen it up as needed. For example, change the titles, change the subheadings, add a new intro and conclusion. You can even add new images if needed.

Test and Track Everything

Finally, as you move forward you’re going to want to test and track everything. Use your goals to measure whether you’re getting the results you want to get or not. Based on the results you may need to tweak some things as you go.

For example, let’s say your social media efforts are bringing a lot of traffic, but the traffic is not converting. You can assume that something is wrong with your landing page. If you fix that to be more in line with the content they’re clicking through by, then you may improve conversions.

The only way to know for sure is to look at the data to help you track, test, and tweak until your efforts are perfected and producing the results you desire.