The Art of Effective Content Syndication

Sharing is caring, they say, but for online marketers creating content it’s absolutely essential. Sharing, or syndication, is an art form in itself, which is why we’ve assembled some of the best tips on how and where to post links to other websites. 

1. Make syndication part of your publishing routine

It’s quite one thing to produce great marketing content – blog articles, ebooks, webinar recordings, and so on – but if you’re not telling people about it, it’s all for nothing.

Create a checklist of syndication outlets, the most obvious being social media. Write your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn messages under your blog article draft, within the Word, Pages or Google Docs document you’re working on. This makes sharing after you upload your article that much quicker. 

2. Set up social media profiles, sharing buttons and use a management platform 

Create Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn business pages or profiles. You can also look into Google+, Pinterest and other networks growing in popularity.

Make sure your content platform includes social media sharing buttons. This will make things quicker for you, and also encourage visitors to do a little syndication for you. The popular blogging platform Wordpress – if you're using it – has many plugins that will add share buttons, the most popular of which is ShareThis. 

Use a social media management tool like HootSuite or TweetDeck to administer all your accounts in one place, and do useful things like automatic URL shortening and scheduling. No more hopping between multiple tabs, cut and pasting links between windows.

3. Distinguish between community management and syndication 

A community manager maintains a social media presence, including posting updates, interesting articles and engaging in discussions with followers.

Syndication is purely the task of sharing links to your content on any other website, including, but not limited, to social media.

You can of course task your community manager with syndication, but we find it’s more efficient for the person who uploads the article (i.e. publishes it) to post links to external websites as part of their routine (see Point 1).

4. Schedule your syndication in advance

This works particularly well on Twitter. Use TweetDeck or HootSuite (see Point 2) to schedule tweets with links to your article, to be sent out periodically over the next few weeks or even months depending on how often you want to remind people about your content.

Always make sure these tweets are unique – there’s nothing worse than repetitive, robot-like automated messages.

Facebook and LinkedIn are slightly different, because while you can alter the wording, scheduling an update with a different image might be problematic. We tend to only syndicate to Facebook once.

If you have something newsworthy to blog about, why not create a media release? Distribute it on popular newswires like PR Newswire, PRWeb and PRLog. You may need to pay to use these services, but there are obvious benefits in media attention, as well as positive search engine effects. 

6. Guest blog, but don’t duplicate 

Guest blogging is the big thing right now, and is essentially when you write content for another website and vice versa. The benefit to your business is an inbound link to your website, usually from the bio in your guest post – great for off-page Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), but only if the hosting website has good Google authority.

If your company hosts a guest post on its website, the benefit is additional indexed material (as registered by Google) and hopefully links from the author’s various social media accounts. Again, great for SEO, if your guest blog host has a sizable social media following, especially on Google+. 

Never duplicate your content, that is, don’t send a published article to another website. Google doesn’t like duplicate content, which may negatively affect your rankings.