Once you have content for your email you’re at a jumping off point for your social media content.  Many consultants, trainers, and professional coaches will copy their email content to their social media pages.  That is a good strategy to save time and ensure that content is available to all your channels.  However it’s not the most effective strategy.  The best social media campaigns will break out their email content into a series of social media posts.

Really good social media provides information in bite-size chunks.  Social media audiences typically have an extremely limited attention span so the message needs to be short and to the point to get further attention.  While emails should always have a single focus, it’s common for them to have secondary offers, promotions, or content.  Rather than posting all those things to social media at once by duplicating an email, highly effective social media campaigns will break it out.

Here’s an example.  Suppose an email is sent featuring a business tactic article.  The article itself is the focus of the email but the side bar has a link to an upcoming event as well as a recently released whitepaper.

Rather than posting a link to the email, each element can be a social media post.  So the first posting would be the title of the article and a link to the full article on the website.  The following day a post about the event can be placed on social media pages.  The day after that, a note about the whitepaper can be supplied with a link to a page to download it. In this way very specific offers are being made to social media audiences that they can digest at a glance.

The beauty of social media is that send schedules are almost infinite.  Since people can choose what to look at and when, there’s not the same fear of audience exhaustion that email marketing has to take into account.

Breaking out an email adds quantity to your social media pages without sacrificing quality.  Social media marketing hinges on staying in front of your audience with timely content.  Breaking email messages into small chunks is a good way to make frequent updates and be sure your marketing communications are available across all your channels.