In the world of content marketing unique and original content is always the best route to take. Nowadays everybody is aware of the myriad of trends that come and pass in social media. For all content creators, it becomes important to follow the trends to increase their reach and grow. But how does this following trend turn to plagiarism?
In the content marketing industry, posting unoriginal content or taking inspiration from other content marketers does not count as plagiarism. Social copying is something that happens on various social media platforms and it cannot be avoided. This makes it difficult to understand what should be considered plagiarism. But you need to know how to protect your brand from stealing content and what measures you need to take if your brand gets influenced by plagiarism.
In this blog, we are here to guide you regarding how to keep your brand’s content free from any kind of plagiarism.
What is plagiarism on social media?
Social media has become an essential part of the everyday lives of millions of people around the globe. Back in the year 2017, Jeff Allen who is the senior data scientist of Facebook stated that around 40% of the traffic on Facebook pages visited the pages that stole or rephrased most of their content.
A lot of brand owners using social media handles to maintain their off-page SEO often complain about how their content is stolen by random strangers on various social media platforms. It is pretty easy to steal content on social media platforms as people do not care about social media plagiarism. And when no one is held responsible for plagiarism on such platforms, it spreads.
We can take the example of the time when Facebook was reluctant to remove all the stolen content that was related to anti-vaccination and QAnon conspiracies even after having platform policies that strictly prohibit the posting of any kind of stolen content.
Social media plagiarism is often recognized only when large and established brands try to rip off small brands. For example – There was a time when Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Cosmetics received a lot of backlash and negative comments on social media after exactly recreating the same post that was posted by a vegan makeup page named vladamua. No brand would want to get themselves in situations like this which creates a negative impression about them. Therefore, your brand needs to use social media handles safely and avoid plagiarism.
How to avoid plagiarizing content on social media?
Here, we are sharing some important tips that will help you develop better content creation practices for your brand’s social media handles by taking inspiration from other content marketers but without crossing any kind of ethical limits.
- Be Inspired
Every social media marketer pays proper attention to what type of content receives great success on social media. You can be inspired by successful content but that does not mean it requires stealing the content outright. All you can do is study the structure of the content and pay attention to the eye-catchy texts.
A lot of successful brands create different memes, visual content, posters; etc which gives you an idea to utilize your strategy and it also acts as an opportunity to get your brand engaged in the viral social media trends. For example – Recently back in June 2022, a meme trend of she’s a 10 but… started and various brands got very excited to craft their brand response to that meme to attract their audience.
Recycle your high-performing content pieces
Many successful content marketers grow their brand value by recycling their top-performing content pieces. You might have created a lot of evergreen content which you can reframe a bit and then repost to continue engaging your targeted audience. Recycling your existing content helps you to grow more from the success of your own previously published original content. This is considered to be one of the best ways through which you can easily avoid your brand from getting into social media plagiarism.
Give credit where it is necessary
Some people might not realize social media plagiarism even after being in the content marketing business. It is not wrong to copy a post from other social media handles at times but you must give its credit to the original content creator. All you need to do is put the content inside quotation marks, mention the original creator clearly, and then tag their official account page. It is a great way through which you can copy their content by providing full transparency and citations. This will also save you from getting blames for plagiarism. It is the not correct thing to take credit for someone else’s hard work and if their work is really good then they are worth appreciating.
Instead of directly copy-pasting such content you can create an original piece of content by adding your perspective in addition to that content. Re-share such content by adding your brand perspective to that.
Check your content work before posting it
The best way to avoid plagiarism is to run your content piece including the video scripts through a plagiarism detector tool. There are a lot of free and paid plagiarism checkers available in the market and you can choose any one at your convenience. There are also tools like Grammarly that even help you to identify grammatical mistakes in your content. A thorough plagiarism check would help you to be sure that your content does not have any kind of plagiarism in it which would also act as a plus point in making your content SEO friendly.
Conclusion
Over the years, we have seen the importance of social media growth for various reasons. Social media marketing has evolved to become one of the most useful marketing strategies to boost sales and increase the reach of brands. Being a digital marketer, you cannot avoid the social media trends that would help you attract the targeted audience. But while following up with the social media trends you must remember not to end up in the accusations of plagiarism. You can connect with professional content marketing services to get some expert help and create such social media content that helps to convey your brand image, products, and vision.
