You have heard it all before.  Content is king.  It is what keeps your customers coming back to your blog or website.  It is what you hope your customers retweet or post on their own social media accounts.  In short, it is what drives traffic to your site, what drives social recommendations, and what makes your site appear on search engines.

Without effective content, you cannot hope to be successful in marketing online, not just on social media.  So how do you make sure that you have effective content?  Here are six questions you should ask:

1. Does it fulfill any one of these criteria:

a. Is it informative?  Does your content give your readers information and things they did not know before?  For example, best practices in Twitter marketing or why it makes sense to do PPC.

b. Is it educational?  Does it teach your readers something?  For example, cooking videos and how-to articles.

c. Is it entertaining?  Does it amuse your readers?  Does it make people laugh?  For example, Geico advertisment videos.

d. Is it relevant?  Does the topic of your content have something to do with your brand, company, products or services?  For example, if you deal with flowers and floral arrangements, you might want to focus on content that has something to do with special occasions such as weddings and parties, rather than touching on political issues or terrorism.  Of course, it would be okay, and even recommended, to stray from your main focus once in a while, but be sure to highlight things that are relevant to you.

2. Does it drive awareness for your brand?

It might be difficult to answer but try to gauge just how ‘shareable’ your content is.  Is it something that they would share with their friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter?  Does it make them want to recommend your products, services or company to other people?

3. Does it help you increase your search engine ranking?

Your content is what makes you appear on search results.  You need to make sure that your content contains the right keywords.

4. Does it help you sell something?

Content should also serve as your salesperson.  Remember the maxim to be always closing (ABC).  While you should not blatantly promote your products, services or brand on your blog or social media, make sure that people see you are the only resource for everything related to your industry.  This will give you top-of-mind recall that is necessary so that they will call you when the need arises.  Also, if you syndicate your content, make sure that people go to your website from wherever it is that your site is featured.  For example, if you talk about Web design on another blog, feature examples from your own experience and portfolio.

5. Do you make use of user-generated content?

Reviews and testimonials are a great way to capture new customers. Do you regularly get feedback from your customers and create content based on that?

6. Does your content appear the same no matter what device is used to view it?

You may have a great blog design that looks really well on a computer monitor.  However, it might not be as readable on a mobile phone screen. Make sure that your content translates well no matter what device it is viewed on.  You also encounter the same problem with videos and photos.