Content Marketing vs Social Media Marketing

Content Marketing vs Social Media Marketing – Differences

Social media marketing and content marketing are both part of digital marketing. They have several overlapping characteristics and yet they are different in their intent and approach. Here’s what you need to know about the difference between content marketing vs social media marketing.

Content Marketing

Content marketing aims at generating more engagement, leads, and eventually sales by publishing informational, educational, or entertaining content across the web. It uses content that is unique, engaging, and relevant, and targets a particular audience.

Common types of content include:

• Blogs
• eBooks
• Case Studies
• Videos
• Infographics

Main Objective of Content Marketing

High-quality content builds trust with customers and generates interest in your business. This interest gradually converts leads into prospects and prospects into fans, followers, and customers. That’s the main objective of most content marketing strategies.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media marketing primarily focuses on promoting a business or product through different social media platforms. In social media marketing, there is a higher level of interaction between content publishers and their audience.

On social media, you can start building a community by sharing valuable content that others will want to pass on. Bloggers, business owners, and marketers actively use social media marketing to promote their cause.

Main Objective of Social Media Marketing

The goals of social media marketing include increasing awareness, boosting engagement, and building a community of devoted fans and followers that would ideally act as brand promoters. At the same time, SMM can also connect brands and customers in a way that other types of marketing cannot.

Content Marketing vs Social Media Marketing – How Are Different?

Despite sharing certain similarities, social media marketing and content marketing differ in a few key regards.

They Use Different Channels

When we talk about social media marketing, we talk about platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter which have billions of users between them—a wide mix of different but interconnected audiences. But when you do content marketing, you tend to use mostly your website, blog, and other websites in your niche. In other words, your channels are more targeted.

Forms of Content Published

In social media marketing, you choose the content style based on the networking platforms you are using. Facebook will demand different types of content than Instagram or Twitter. Content marketing is largely dominated by text, video, and visual content. Detailed articles, videos, and eBooks tend to perform best.

Activities Used to Boost Sales

With social media marketing, you have to use different tactics to gain a massive following. You have to publish, share, advertise, engage, and interact. With content marketing, by contrast, you focus more on search engine optimization. You rely more on Google and other search engines for content discovery.

Content Marketing vs Social Media Marketing – The Bottom Line

There are differences as well as similarities between content marketing and social media marketing. At the end of the day, it’s not about which technique you use. Rather, it’s more about how you use both techniques together to generate great results.

If you do only content marketing or only SMM, you won’t tap into all the marketing channels available to you. And your competitors may take advantage of that. You don’t want that to happen, do you?

Content Marketing vs Social Media Marketing

Social Media Channels

• Facebook – The Facebook app Page celebrates how our friends inspire us, support us, and help us discover the world when we connect.
• Instagram – Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together
• Twitter – Twitter is what’s happening and what people are talking about right now.
• YouTube – Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world.