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This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Content marketing –- creating and distributing relevant content to attract, acquire, and engage your target audience –- has become a popular marketing tactic over the past few years. But although most companies understand how to promote their content via their “owned” channels, such as their Facebook Page, their Twitter account or LinkedIn Company Page, many are missing out on the opportunity to get their content in front of a larger audience through paid social promotions.

For example, let’s say you’ve spent time and money developing a great new how-to video or article –- how do you make sure people see it? Promoting it via Facebook Promoted Posts will put it front and center for your fans. Or, what if you’ve received a positive write-up in your local paper? You can make sure your target customers see it by making a small Twitter ad buy targeted at local followers of that paper.

Positive product reviews, media coverage, blog posts and educational content like white papers and presentations can all have tremendous value for your business. Here are three paid social ad tools that can dramatically expand visibility for this content.

1. Facebook Promoted Posts

With Facebook Promoted Posts, businesses pay to have their regular posts appear higher (and more often) in the news feed, so there's a better chance their audience will see them.

“Most small business owners don't realize the impact of just spending a little bit of money to promote posts,” said Anthony Kirlew, Chief Strategist at AKA Internet Marketing. “With all of the noise in the Facebook newsfeeds as well as the EdgeRank factors, the message of most small business Facebook pages is unseen. For a very small amount of money, companies can get the lift that leads to the exposure they are seeking on Facebook.”

To promote a post on your Page, simply create the post and click “Promote” at the bottom of the post. You’ll be prompted to select your audience – either people who like your page, or people who like your page and their friends –- and to set a budget based on how many people you want to reach. Compelling graphics and headlines are important for driving maximum engagement with Promoted Posts, so even if you’re promoting someone else’s content (such as a story about your company in the local paper), consider including your own graphic and headline to make it pop.

Galen Ward, co-founder and CEO of real estate search engine Estately, used Facebook Promoted Posts to seed viral sharing of its fun blog post, "37 Things You Should Know Before Moving to Seattle.” Ward’s strategy was to go narrow with the post promotion, crafting a post that would appeal to Seattle sports fans, and then promoting it to people who have the Seahawks as one of the interests on Facebook.

According to Ward, the company spent just under $100 and got 8,500 Likes and tens of thousands of visitors to the web site.

“We paid under $3 CPM and got around a five percent click-through rate — so for under $100 we got our post in front of over 30,000 people,” said Ward. “Without Facebook, it would have travelled through our limited networks, but with Facebook ads we got it in front of virtually every person who might be interested in it. And because the content was engaging and in front of the right people, it sparked a ton of viral sharing.”

Ward says they are now experimenting with spending $10-20 to promote each of their blog posts and will up the spend for posts that perform well.

2. Twitter Promoted Tweets

Twitter recently launched a self-service capability for Promoted Tweets, which are regular tweets that you pay to promote to more people. Twitter allows you to target people by geography, interest or gender, and you only pay only when people click, retweet, favorite or reply to your tweet.

Twitter’s pricing system is based on bidding: you set the maximum amount you’re willing to spend per follow or click, and Twitter will give you suggestions for what you should bid to optimize your campaign. Twitter tools allow you to see how each of your tweets is performing; after a few days of running promoted tweets, check back in to gauge how the campaign is working and whether you need to adjust your bid.

Online music publication Prefix Magazine used Promoted Tweets to increase brand awareness and drive more high-quality readers to their site, prefixmag.com. The site saw an immediate 49% jump in visitor traffic from Twitter compared to the week before the Twitter ad campaign. “When a tweet is resonating, I want to keep it resonating — to have that tweet snowball — and Twitter advertising makes that happen,” said Prefix Magazine’s Publisher Dave Park.

Daniel Rothamel, founder of artist management company Two Plus Media offered free downloads of “The Wretched”, a mixtape by his client NomiS, via Promoted Tweets. The $50 campaign, which targeted users in the U.S. interested in Christian and Gospel music, resulted in 7,900 impressions and 105 engagements on the tweet.

"One of my biggest challenges with promoting new artists is cutting through the clutter to find the people who are already interested in the music my artists create,” said Rothamel. “Promoted Tweets helps me target these people more effectively, giving me a greater chance at successfully turning them into fans."

3. LinkedIn Ads

To get your content in front of a business audience, consider LinkedIn Ads, which run on prominent pages on the LinkedIn.com website. Ads consist of a headline, a description (up to 75 characters of text), your name or company name, a small image and a URL. You can specify which LinkedIn members view your ads by selecting targeting criteria such as job title, job function, industry, geography, age, gender, company name, company size or even by a particular LinkedIn Group (such as “Corporate Real Estate”). Like with Twitter, you set a maximum budget and only pay for the clicks or impressions that you receive.

According to LinkedIn, the best-performing ads are relevant to the target audience and written with clear, compelling words. LinkedIn suggests that you highlight special offers, unique benefits, white papers, free trials or demos to get people’s attention, and include strong call-to-action phrases like Try, Download, Sign up or Request a Quote.

Internet marketing agency Cardinal Web Solutions used a LinkedIn ad featuring a company culture presentation to help generate interest in their job openings. According to founder and CEO Alex Membrillo, “The content included in the presentation has been very effective for attracting qualified candidates, and overall interest in our company has increased significantly.”

Marketing software company HubSpot is offering white papers and free educational resources via LinkedIn Ads to attract marketing professionals. The company says it first experimented with ad campaigns on social networks other than LinkedIn, but the campaigns did not yield satisfactory results.

"There's a lot of distraction on other social networks," said Dan Slagen, the company's head of paid marketing. "People are there for reasons besides improving their businesses, or networking with other professionals. We need to connect with B2B companies that are focused on lead generation, which means LinkedIn is the place for us.

According to Slagen, HubSpot’s LinkedIn Ads generate a click-through rate that is 60 percent higher than its average across other social networks, with much higher quality leads.

"There's no clutter on LinkedIn - members are there to do business," he added.

Getting Started

Ready to get started but still not sure which channel makes the most sense for you?

HipLogiq CTO and cofounder Adam Root recommends that small businesses consider all three networks, but use them for different purposes.

“My strategy is to use Twitter to gain new users, Facebook to build a community and LinkedIn to generate leads for the sales team,” says Root. “My logic in choosing this strategy is that Twitter is a good medium for targeting moments and encouraging action, Facebook is a great medium for building long-term relationships and LinkedIn is a business network with high-profile agencies in its user base that I’d want as customers.”

Source :mashable

Not long ago, the media looked at the web as if it was an awkward, unwanted stepchild. Today, the reverse is arguably true, with debate growing over whether social networks such as Twitter will overtake beacons of journalism like The New York Times.

At last month's Milken Institute Global Conference, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel said he thinks Twitter will outlast The Times. His reasoning: Its business strategy is more solid than that of the storied newspaper.

The debate got journalists talking on forums such as Muck Rack, with many people disagreeing. Some said it isn't a mutually exclusive relationship, or that one's success is predicated on the other's failure.

Comments from Twitter's CEO seem to support this. At All Things D's conference last week, Dick Costolo took the opposite approach to Thiel, and essentially called Twitter a friend to media companies — whether they're print, television or strictly online.

"We think of ourselves as very complementary to news orgs," he told All Things D's Kara Swisher. "We’re the platform for global information distribution for the people, by the people. The news orgs are the curators, the editors, the analysts. They do that important work."

When Swisher asked if Twitter is looking to expand and morph into a news organization, Costolo said that's not in the microblogging network's future: "No, I see us partnering more with news orgs to distribute this real-time feed of info, probably working with companies that can help organize that information and dole it out to news org readers."

Detractors aside, many media pundits see the two as far more intertwined than anyone envisioned when Twitter debuted seven years ago.

"I think they're in love," press critic and New York University professor Jay Rosen told Mashable. "Nothing more to say."

This mutual affection has helped Twitter and other social networks become tools for journalists, according to Dan Pacheco, chair of journalism innovation at Syracuse University's Newhouse School. Rather than pitting news organizations against Twitter, Pacheco said there should be a focus on "the emergence of journalists as social-media brands."

Twitter has enabled journalists to amplify their voices and brands, he said, thereby helping them get more attention than they previously would have without the social network.

"The brands with most impact will be connected to individual journalists," Pacheco told Mashable. "For example, The New York Times' David Carr (@carr2n) has 420,000 Twitter followers that he built through authentic usage of the social media ... Is that all David Carr on Twitter, or all New York Times? It's a little of both."

Mark Glaser, executive editor of PBS MediaShift, agrees that it's all about making Twitter work for news organizations as a partner, rather seeing it as an enemy.

"The idea for publishers and news orgs is that they need to work Twitter to their advantage," Glaser said, citing driving site traffic, and selling sponsored tweets, as examples. "All these deals between Twitter and ESPN, Fox, etc., seem to be additive to the publishers and helpful, as long as these deals are not exclusive."

Therein lies the irony: As news organizations vie for eyeballs and page views, they are getting those numbers largely from posts on social sites — the new pathways to news. Last year, a report by the Pew Research Center showed exactly where Internet users are spending their time, and from where they're getting their news. The answer is increasingly social networks.

Pew found that the average Facebook user spent about 423 minutes a month on the site compared to under 12 minutes per month on a top 25 news site. While Facebook users consume news differently than Twitter users (with Facebookers getting more news from friends and family, as opposed to friends, family and news outlets for Twitter users), and most people are still going straight to news websites for their information, the tide is turning more towards social becoming a go-to source.

Such an intimate relationship between news consumption and social platforms such as Twitter therefore cannot be ignored.

"The key for publishers is to make sure they can own the relationships between themselves and fans/followers," Glaser said. "And not let Twitter get that."

Source : mashable