We’ve talked about social media before on this blog, about how it can be a useful tool for communicating with your customers, and how it can be used to promote your product or services.

However, one thing we’ve not mentioned yet is that while you can and should use social media to promote yourself, that’s not all it’s for.

Social media is a two way street. While it can get your company in front of loads of people, if you want to keep their attention and get their business you need to give them something that they’re looking for.

Sometimes that can come from the amazing content you’re producing (and if you’re not, get in touch), but more often than not it means sharing content from outside your company.

In other words, it’s not all about you.

Don’t be like The Mountain, share your toys

What kind of content should you be sharing?

So we’ve established that you should be sharing content from other places on social media, but what content should you be sharing?

The truth is that apart from making sure it’s not illegal, there are no set rules on what content you should share. It depends entirely on what kind of business you are, and what your business’ personality is.

From your customers’ point of view, you are your timeline. Every piece of content you share says something about what kind of company you are.

This means that you have to think very carefully, and have a strategy in place when it comes to sharing content from other places.

For example while you personally may live and breathe cat videos, if you’re the social media manager for a law firm or funeral home then they might be best left to your personal timeline.

What kind of outside content do Elastic share?

When it comes to sharing from other sources, we’ve got two key parts to our strategy.

The first is to share interesting articles about digital marketing from the sources we use to keep on top of current trends and best practice, such as Econsultancy, Social Media Today, and Hubspot.

Why do we share this? We do it to show that we’re committed to being experts at what we do, and that the advice we give our customers is always well researched.

However, while we want to be seen as experts in digital marketing, we also want our audience to get an idea of who we are as people.

That’s why we also share things that match with our own interests such as:

• articles about upcoming films we’re excited about
• pictures of upcoming cakes that we’re also excited about
• several pictures of our adorable office dog, Cooper

Why do we share this? Because we want our customers to know that as well as being good at what we do, we’re also friendly and fun to work with. By sharing what we’re interested in, we hope that our customers feel like they’ve got to know us before they even get in touch.

Also, this kind of content, while not strictly promotional, tends to get good engagement. One of our most popular tweets was simply some slow motion footage of the snow outside our office.

It might not have been directly promoting our services, but it was really pretty.

Next steps

Hopefully, you’re now well on your way to thinking carefully about what your audience is interested in seeing and regularly sharing it with them.

However, if you need someone to take a look at your audience and kick-start your social media activity, get in touch and we’ll see how best to get your brand out there.