By: Christina Hager

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com on November 9, 2019.

Great content can do a lot for you as a thought leader, but you must keep it active and be strategic with how you manage distribution. Publishing one article and a tweet every few months doesn’t effectively build your brand or your audience. Whether you are an individual thought leader or represent an organization or business, you need a smart, savvy way to keep your insights alive and in front of your target audience.

In my last article, I discussed creating content that provides value and motivates your audience to take action, such as downloading a whitepaper, leaving a comment or clicking through to your website. But no matter how amazing that content, you need to understand how and where to distribute it for maximum impact.

Why Distribution Matters

If you post content — even high-value content — just one time in one place, your effort will die there. There is simply too much digital noise for that strategy to do much. Instead, create a strategy for creating content, publishing it and recirculating it over weeks and months. That is how you establish and distribute thought leadership to your target demographic.

A client of mine recently followed these recommendations and went from having 33 LinkedIn connections to more than 3,500 connections within the year, and even started trending on LinkedIn in his area of expertise. The secret of his success? Creating a “circle of life” with his content.

Step 1: Know Where Your Content Should Go

Each channel has rules about character length, photo pixel size, etc. Acquaint yourself with these rules. Luckily, there are a ton of best practices and optimization techniques to help you with each channel.

Take it a step further and learn what parts of your target demographic are on which channels, and how they digest content. For example, a nice short video with vibrant colors and locations will find a natural home on Instagram, while going live for an event or speaking opportunity works well on Facebook. Twitter is a great place to have chats that quickly connect with individuals, while LinkedIn can support a long-form update or article.

While you might be aware of all of this, confirm it for your specific needs. Make sure you know where your audience “lives,” and use analytics to make educated guesses about where and when you need to distribute content. Without these strategies, you will have difficulty maximizing your social media outreach.

Step 2: Give Your Content Life

Let’s say you write a blog post for your website. Some might consider that task over and done with once it’s posted, but that’s the wrong way to look at it. Instead, set up a procedure to distribute that content today, in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days and again next year. This method will get more eyes on your content, which leads to more chances for engagement as well as more opportunities for your readership to contact you.

For example, instead of posting your content as a blog post, I urge you to first create it as an article published on the LinkedIn platform. All you need is your text and one image — either create one or buy a stock photo. Once you’ve written the LinkedIn article, share your article on your own LinkedIn feed. This warm audience of connections already knows and follows you and is more likely to engage. Give them a chance to read, comment and even share your words.

Next, share it to your relevant social media platforms. LinkedIn makes it easy to share the URL of your LinkedIn article on Twitter or Facebook by pressing just one button.

Are you a member of any LinkedIn groups? If the answer is no, why not? LinkedIn groups are a great (and free) way to interact with smaller, legitimate leads or colleagues who have the same interests or are in the same industry as you. If you are a business consultant focused on people solutions, you can join human resources-related groups like the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) or the Human Resources Management Association of Chicago (HRMAC). If you are a meeting planner, there are groups devoted to planning and optimizing meetings, locally, regionally and across the globe.

Post your article in these LinkedIn groups, but — and this is huge — remember not to spam your group with your services. Instead, create some questions and offer your article as a jumping-off point to get a conversation going.

Once this article has lived online for 30 days, take that same text and image and publish it as a blog post on your website. Next, reshare that blog’s URL across your social media channels, again hitting LinkedIn and LinkedIn groups.

Why? First, this strategy gives people who might have missed your content the first time a chance to see it. Second, it helps you build your search engine optimization (SEO) — the way people find your website via search engines such as Google.

Want the content to live past 60 days? Record a video of you discussing some of the same content. Host it on YouTube, optimized with keywords and a summary of your article. Then take your YouTube URL and, you guessed it, distribute that URL again across your social media channels.

Want that article to live again next year? Update the title, change a few things (updating or adding stats is a great way to update content), publish it and start the cycle again.

Having trouble keeping track of what piece of content is going where? Create a simple spreadsheet with the content, content type, dates and times of where it was posted, and which social media channels it went to.

As long as you are creating content, sharing it, waiting the
recommended time between redistribution and engaging in this
“cycle of life” for multiple pieces, your distribution game will be
strong. Stay diligent in your distribution efforts and people
will start to see you as the go-to expert in your field.

Take it a step further and learn what parts of your target demographic are on which channels, and how they digest content. For example, a nice short video with vibrant colors and locations will find a natural home on Instagram, while going live for an event or speaking opportunity works well on Facebook. Twitter is a great place to have chats that quickly connect with individuals, while LinkedIn can support a long-form update or article.

While you might be aware of all of this, confirm it for your specific needs. Make sure you know where your audience “lives,” and use analytics to make educated guesses about where and when you need to distribute content. Without these strategies, you will have difficulty maximizing your social media outreach.