Why You Need to Be Publishing Content in Multiple Platforms

Content marketing has been ablaze in marketing and sales discussions for years now. That being said, a noteworthy shift in focus has been taking place. “Historically” the conversation that leaders in the industry have revolved around building your own audience.

Now, however, the talking points have shifted to publishing platforms.

Multi-channel publishing refers to publishing content across multiple content platforms to reach your audience on a greater scale than would otherwise be possible, and thereby build your online visibility and authority, often significantly. So, rather than just publishing content on your blog as you may have done a few years or even months ago, the same content is reworked and repurposed across other platforms.

–Duplicate Content and Multi-Channel Publishing—The Lowdown

Contently puts it perfectly:

The magazine of the future is no longer the one you print yourself; it’s everywhere your audience hangs out. Succeeding in content marketing over the next five years is going to be about publishing to multiple platforms. It’s how brands will effectively build owned audiences and maximize their share of voice in a competitive landscape.

–Contently, Dec 2015

When it comes to enabling customer engagement and innovating the customer experience, you have to be where the customers are. And that is why it’s paramount to consider omni-channel publishing or publishing in multiple platforms.

Content Marketing Forum offers dozens of platforms on social media alone—these being the top seven:

1. Twitter– With over half a billion registered users, Twitter lets users post messages of up to 140 characters, share photos and videos, create custom lists, send direct messages, and more.
2. Facebook– This social media platform has over a billion users and lets users connect with friends, share links, photos, videos, and events, join groups, and more.
3. Pinterest– Pinterest users share and tag images and videos on customizable boards, follow brands and individuals, “repin” images, and more. Pinterest has nearly 50 million users.
4. LinkedIn– A business-focused online network that includes features such as sharing links, adding connections, joining groups, writing recommendations, searching for connections by company, industry, skills, and more.
5. Google+– Google’s social network that allows users to set up hangouts using video chat, create “circles” of people for organizing contacts and targeting messaging, and more.
6. Offerpop– Offerpop is a social media platform for businesses to recruit, engage and convert customers.

As the number of platforms continues to explode, you can expect a rising in competition when it comes to enabling customer experience, however, other dynamics are changing too which actually can work toward your benefit. Consider Forbes’ prediction for 2016 with respect to content marketing and user expectations.

With custom newsfeeds and tailored search results, users are already starting to grow accustomed to individualized results in the digital world. Soon, this will be applied to content, as users demand content that shifts or responds to user prompts. Expect to see the demand for individually tailored content grow. —Forbes

Finally, publishing across multiple channels does not mean simply flat-out duplicating your content in different platforms. What’s behind ensuring a high link value for publishing your content across different platforms is repurposing that content to fit the channel you’re choosing. When you simple push repeat across different platforms, you actually decrease your credibility.

Here are a few words on that again from a great post on the matter in Duplicate Content and Multi-Channel Publishing—The Lowdown.

The most effective way to ensure you retain (and in fact, build) the authority of the content on your own site, is through content repurposing. This involves reworking the content to suit the platform you are publishing on. Sometimes it involves different media completely. So a post on your blog can become the basis of a podcast episode, a YouTube video, or a SlideShare presentation. For written content, it means rewriting and reformulating it as necessary.

In sum, you need to be publishing in multiple platforms to be seen—to be where your customers are, and to stay relevant to what they are looking for and what they want to do with your brand.

So, which platforms should you be posting your digital content? Which ones are best suited to the interactive tools you are looking to adopt? Let’s chat about these and other questions you have in mind – email projects@thirtyfive.io.