7 Content Sharing Sites You Need to Be On

This week, I’m kicking off a new series on content distribution by examining the seven content sharing sites that every marketer should be using.

Building a content factory is about more than just creating great content. It’s also about sharing that content in a variety of ways to increase the chances of it reaching your audience. After all, what’s the point of creating new eBooks, case studies, or blog posts if most of the people they’re intended for never have the chance to consume it.

It should come as no surprise that these days that means doing a lot more than just posting your content to your own website. Even if you’ve got great content that’s prominently displayed on your site and search engine optimized, you still need to make sure it’s on the right content sharing sites.

The reason is simple: Chances are that your site only garners a tiny fraction of the traffic that the best content sharing sites do. As a result, if they’re not a part of your content distribution strategy, you’re missing a huge opportunity to get more people engaging with your content. While the seven sites I’ve listed below are certainly familiar, they’re worth noting since few expansion-stage B2B companies take advantage of them all.

Promoting your content on the seven content sharing sites listed below should be baked into your distribution strategy:

 

1) SlideShare — A free community site, SlideShare allows users to share visual content such as presentations, eBooks, and videos. It is one of the most popular sites that people go to for business content, receiving an average of more than 60 million visitors and 130 million page views a month. Since being acquired by LinkedIn earlier this year, it has become possible to seamlessly integrate your SlideShare content into your company’s LinkedIn page.

2) Scribd — Described as the world’s largest online library, Scribd is a free community content sharing site. Whereas SlideShare focuses on visual content, Scribd is better suited to text-based documents such as reports, white papers, and case studies. Like SlideShare, it also gets a tremendous volume of traffic every month.

3) YouTube — It used to be that YouTube was the place you went to watch cute videos of people’s cats. While the feline community remains alarmingly well represented, today the site is also the home to a considerable amount of business-related content. With more than 800 million unique visitors a month, it’s the gateway to one of the largest audiences online.

4) LinkedIn — As the business networking site, LinkedIn has evolved into a great site for content sharing with targeted audiences. Members frequently segment themselves into a huge array of LinkedIn Groups based on their industry, interests, and needs, making it easy to find a good home for virtually any content you produce.

5) Google+ — While initially slow to take off, Google+ has gained significant traction since its launch and has evolved into a great vehicle for sharing content. Perhaps one of the greatest benefits of doing so is that Google rewards your efforts by immediately indexing your content and giving it a little SEO boost. Access to a steadily growing audience and enhanced SEO are two great reasons to incorporate Google+ in your distribution strategy.

6) Facebook — Although not typically a place to promote heady white papers or the like, experiment with posting lighter content such as blog posts and infographics. Occasionally integrating fun content into a well maintained Facebook page can pay off.

7) Twitter — Although not a place to post actual content, social sharing tools like Twitter are easy to use and ideally suited to content sharing. When doing so, remember to follow the 4-1-1 Rule:  For every one self-serving tweet, you should publish four tweets that aren’t about you and your company and one re-tweet.

By posting and sharing your content through these and other content sharing sites, you will be making it available to a much broader audience. In many cases, doing so will also give you the opportunity to create more inbound links to your own site. Utilizing these  sites doesn’t require a complex strategy. The most important thing is simply ensuring that you do use them.

In my next post in this series, I’ll look at content subscription as a way to share content.