5-6-2013
Don?t get me wrong, using radio promotion is a powerful tool for driving traffic to your Web, mobile, and social media platforms. However, if you want to deepen engagement with your community, it?s no longer enough. You need to make sharing your content even easier.
I realize most radio folks don?t want to hear this, but the most financially successful Web businesses were all built by sharing. Think about it, craigslist, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Zappos, eBay, and Google attribute much of their success to capitalizing on the sharing behavior of their communities.
Radio has an enormous opportunity to combine its promotional power with the sharing power of its listeners. Here are three free tools to make sharing your station?s content even easier.
1. The YouTube of Audio Content
Everyone knows video gets shared on YouTube and photos get shared on Facebook, but where do you share audio? You can now share it on SoundCloud.com.
Most radio stations have a live stream on their website, but if a listener hears something they want to share, there is no easy way to do it. The content is stuck in a stream. SoundCloud makes sharing your awesome audio content like funny segments from your morning show, great debates from talk radio, or awesome sports rants easier to share.
You can upload an audio file to SoundCloud for sharing with their community and then easily embed their player on your website for each audio clip. Social media tools are also integrated into the player to promote sharing. It?s completely free and makes sharing your unique audio content even easier, helping it reach an even larger online audience.
2. Schedule Your Social Media Posts
Anyone maintaining the Facebook page or Twitter feed for your station knows how time consuming it can be if you are going to do it right. Instead of remembering to post content each day you can now schedule it in advance using bufferapp.
There are several other social media scheduling tools, but I prefer the simplicity of bufferapp. You can schedule posts on both Facebook and Twitter, and choose the days of the week and time of day you want your posts to appear. Analytical tools also help you track how users interact with your social media content.
3. AddThis To Each Piece Of Web Content
Surprisingly, most radio station websites don?t included sharing tools like email or posting to social media for each piece of content on their website. To make sharing your website?s content easier for your users, try AddThis.com. (Seriously, that?s its name!)
Notice the orange ?share? icon underneath the title of each article on RadioInk? That?s from AddThis. Using a piece of free code from AddThis, you can add that same icon to each one of your posts so your users can email or print that content, as well as share it on over 300 social media networks.
If you aren?t making your Web content easier to share, you?re depressing your Web traffic and preventing your station from building a larger audience. Everyone on the Web today is sharing, it?s time your station was too.
Stephen Warley is the founder of inboundarts.com, a research and training firm dedicated to helping radio broadcasters use digital tools to generate more qualified sales leads. He is also the founded of LocalBroadcastSales.com in 2008. Have a question for Stephen? Email him at stephen@inboundarts.com or connect with him on LinkedIn.
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