Brafton has reported that it will be essential to seed social sites with quality content in 2011, and the buzz at Affiliate Summit West confirms that social content is key […]

Brafton has reported that it will be essential to seed social sites with quality content in 2011, and the buzz at Affiliate Summit West confirms that social content is key to branding. In Tuesday’s keynote speech, Brian Solis discussed the concept of the "Egosystem" developing around social media and shared stats that demonstrate the need to offer relevant information to social users.

Solis explains that through the evolving Egosystem, consumers are spending less time visiting websites, news sources and other online resources, instead expecting relevant information to be delivered directly to them. This supports Brafton's earlier reports that Americans are increasingly looking to their inboxes to keep up with the latest headlines, and Pew says nearly one in 10 regularly look to social networks to find news.

Marketers must treat social media as content discovery platforms, Solis says. He cites research that 30 billion pieces of content get shared through Facebook each month, and there are 10 million Tweets posted on the microblogging site each day. At the same time, only about 2 percent of Tweets are shared.

The value of engaging a social audience and creating Tweets that fall into that 2 percent that gets shared is not to be underestimated. Solis refers to data showing that about half of consumers are more likely to do business with a brand they follow on social sites. Moreover, influence is becoming a general standard measurement that studies both what social users say about brands and the consequences of social mentions for businesses.

In order to get the most out of social content, marketers must know their social audience. This relates to other insight from Affiliate Summit West about the value of generating highly targeted content for effective branding.

Solis urges marketers to use tools such as Research.ly to learn more about their followers and then reverse engineer content that will appeal to these audiences. “Capture attention where it is already focused,” he suggests. He says compelling content is how brands win consumers' trust.

Moreover, compelling content is becoming a competitive necessity. Brafton has reported that an eMarketer report shows 73 percent of businesses seed their social sites with original, branded content.

Katherine Griwert is Brafton's Marketing Director. She's practiced content marketing, SEO and social marketing for over five years, and her enthusiasm for new media has even deeper roots. Katherine holds a degree in American Studies from Boston College, and her writing is featured in a number of web publications.