Social media strategy matters
Getting strategic about social media content helps manage your time. The bonus is that it makes you focus on the outcomes or actions you’re trying to achieve.
Hey, for some of us, social media is more about hanging in our yoga pants and looking at pretty pictures while connecting with friends. For others, a social media strategy is needed to generate business outcomes like visibility or brand awareness … or impact or meaning … or whatever.
Knowing who your audience is and what they want to see on social media is the biggest part of the picture. Creating content that they will like, comment on, and share is the harder part - especially if you want to turn social media followers into customers for your business.
When it comes to your audience, it’s more important to know what they think, feel and do as well as basics like:
Age
Location
Interests
Social channels they like to hang out on
Social media can literally suck more time than it’s worth
Without a strategy and an audience plan, social media will suck you dry. It’s a fact.
Furthermore, the production of social media assets - the photos, the videos, the captions - can literally have you tearing your hair out in frustration.
You can invest in expensive scheduling tools to get over the hump of producing social media content. Or you can just get smarter about how you use it.
I recommend a social strategy that gets you to:
STICK TO A TIME COMMITMENT: Unlike exercise or dieting, where it’s really easy for me to limit my time, I find social media can take my attention span into deep, dark holes and desire loops that I can’t escape. I need to set a timer and walk away, even if something is unfinished or I can lose hours upon hours of time.
OUTLINES YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS: This takes thought and commitment - I dive into it in The Vault membership area but you basically need to know
Social media isn’t just a “free” way to attract an audience - it takes time and consistency. I like using this kind of media map to choose where to focus, depending on the business outcomes needed.
Choosing the right social media channels … not just about your audience
Deciding which social media channels to work on depends on two things:
Your audience
Your personal preferences
It makes sense to use only the channels your key audience is on, as well as the channels you actually enjoy using. Hint: if you can’t take great photos, then Instagram might not be for you. If you don’t like dancing, is Tik Tok really your thing?
Interestingly, some social channels are just too big to ignore. I’m looking specifically at you, Facebook.
New research from Pew Research in the US found most Americans - and the ACCC has found the same in Australia - are getting more of their news through social channels.
The dotted line circles show the percentage of Americans who use each channel and of those people, how many use it to get news. You can read more here.
So Twitter, YouTube and Facebook deliver or surface more ‘news’ for their users than Tumblr and Tik Tok. Interestingly, most of my clients are obsessed with LinkedIn, but you can see that LinkedIn’s business reputation means less people check in to that channel - let’s face it, there’s not enough memes and dancing to make people click into LinkedIn as often as they will other channels.
Personally, I like LinkedIn for the curation of content and the specific information it can surface for me. It’s value is less for connection, and more as an information source. And the thing with social media content strategy is that it helps to use channels you enjoy engaging with - it’s no fun churning out content and engaging and liking and commenting on other people’s stuff if it totally sucks.
Social media channels will only continue to fragment and change over time. There is no “perfect” channel. You can have success on any of them, provided you are focussed on your goals and desired outcomes.
You won’t have success if you try to be on all of them. It’s simply too hard.
To be successful with social media strategy, you have to be social. That means spending less time thinking about your message and business goals and more time:
commenting on other people’s stuff
sharing content that’s valuable (not just your own!)
helping people
showing and demonstrating your leadership or style in a way that works for that channel’s ‘desire loop’