Think You’re an Expert? Show It.

USDA Prime Content is no longer simply sharing 3rd party curation or generating blog posts. Jumping into conversations where they are happening is critical. Taking a stance on an issue or offering an opinion, a resolution or an insight from your experience is lean, high-octane fuel for your content marketing program.
 
In fact, the large financial education site, Investopedia, has announced a new Q&A offering featuring responses from a pre-vetted group of RIAs. We believe this represents an emerging trend of niche communities and genuine expertise. The generic social networks will remain strong, but the real conversations will take place in semi-closed social environments. This is not new, but there will be new communities using new ways to interact which will breathe life into them.

One new strategy we’re having success with involves pulling questions from existing popular forums. Our staff gets alerts for category-specific questions being asked on Quora, Reddit, and others. They review these questions and pass them along to our customers, who then respond. If you are managing your own content program, you would just go to the forum directly. If we are managing it for you, our platform collects your answer, posts to the forum, distributes your answer thru your social networks, and then monitors, and analyzes interactions. Good answers to real questions have garnered 100’s and even 1,000’s of views–not potential impressions. For anyone who high-fives when their blog gets a few likes you know the value here. This simple workflow is also a great way to crowd-proof concepts you are thinking about for longer format posts or white papers.

In the near future, answering relevant questions from public forums will be part of every thought leadership program.