Three quick wins to improve your social media

We see and create a lot of social media content. And there are three things we see that are common to those who are winning at engaging existing and new audiences.

1. Turn the telescope around

We reviewed a corporate Twitter feed recently to find 85% of content was irrelevant to our client’s audience. Company feeds are in major danger of falling somewhere between ‘public service broadcaster’ and ‘pub-bore’. It’s all about me – when it should be about you. You need to be looking for the intersection of your customers’ interests and your objectives. If you’re selling, you’re solving a problem – known or unknown. Focus on that. And if it means creating more than one feed for different audiences, do it. It couldn’t be easier to manage multiple feeds these days.

2. Interruption is not dead

Social media is like any form of marketing. People will stop and read, watch or listen because humans are inquisitive creatures by nature. But only something interesting. Don’t believe me? Have you seen the two lion cubs greeting the woman who gave them up for adoption seven years previously? It’s here. It was shared hundreds of thousands of times, by people who weren’t looking for value in lion-ownership or adoption techniques. Now imagine Whiskas or Lion Bar had been behind the story. As Henry Ford once said, “If I just listened to what my customers wanted, I would have designed a faster horse…”

3. Size doesn’t matter

It’s a myth to believe that attention spans now mean every message must be squeezed into 140 characters, or 30 seconds. People will pay attention to something relevant, if it remains so. Sure, there are competing pressures/demands on our time. But a strong, clear message delivered in an engaging way can be long. It’s taken you xx minutes to read this far, after all.

And keep your message clear. Don’t fudge it with multiple messages. In this blog, I want to help make your social media more effective. That’s it. I’ve no desire to tell you about anything else. Be like a laser, not a shotgun. Write for one person not hundreds.
And then you’re adding value. Like giving four useful tips when you only promised three…