There is a growing awareness of how important paid, earned and owned media is to building a brand and recent articles are starting to share best practices. Here’s a link to a good article about images and social media from the IAB.
From the article:
Moving forward, it’s important to think about visual content for Pinterest as well as other social media sources. In August, nearly 33% of traffic to our publishers’ sites was referral traffic – those are your social media sources. It’s not just about Pinterest. It is important to include images for Pinterest, but it is also important to set featured images for content so that shares to platforms like Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn look as ‘appetizing’ as possible to entice click-throughs from the potential readers who see them.”
This is really not an earth shattering suggestion but rather begs the question of where does great visual content come from? And, how does it get posted and where?
Peppering the internet with good social media content is a labor intensive and therefore expensive effort, unless you think of your independent dealer channel as part of your labor force. Dealers are constantly working on their social media sites and are in dire need of appealing content about the brands they sell.
So, adding social media friendly landing pages to your marcom portal and ad builder for dealers does a lot to help you leverage dealer owned media and build your brand online without any labor or publication costs.
It’s a gold mine waiting to be tapped.