the biggest mistake I see on social media
It’s actually surprising how often this happens! I’ll be scrolling through Insta or catching up on Facebook and BAM! Multimillion-dollar brands with huge marketing staffs and generous marketing budgets making this common and dangerous mistake on social media. From the local bakery with a small following to a thought leader who gets millions of views on a three-second video, many organizations repeat this flub that could wind up costing all of them big-time.
It’s time to face the facts*:
• Instagram users upload 46,740 million posts every minute
• 3 million Facebook posts are loaded every minute
• Users tweet 455,000 times every minute
Bottom line: just being on social media isn’t enough anymore. You have to cut through the clutter. Our inability to do so brings me back to the constant mistake I see on social media. I think it’s best summed up in a quote from the infuriatingly accurate Dorothy Zbornak (from The Golden Girls):
“Catch me on a day when the story’s about me.”
It’s a common practice we forget to apply to our social:
Everyone remembers that amazing scene from Glengarry Glen Ross, but Mr. Eldorado Cadillac-AlwaysBeClosing forgot one integral part of selling: the principle of WIIFM (What’s in it for me?). If you’re not asking this question with every single post you publish on social media marketing, it doesn’t matter what hashtags you use, what image you publish, or the quality of the video production.
If you aren’t posting for the benefit of the end user, you’re just another one of the hundreds of thousands of voices out there making noise and not saying anything.
And before you ask, the answer is yes.
It is more than possible to provide value to your target market on social media. The kind of value you’re providing will depend entirely on your target market. I’m not here to tell you that I can give you the magic formula to take your social media marketing from 0 to 60 in five seconds because no one can do that without understanding your client, inside and out.
I can tell you some general areas to get started:
- EducateThis is a constant staple of content marketing; it’s providing information your target market finds valuable.
- Entertain
Give your audience something they find entertaining and enjoyable even if it’s for a few moments. - Engage
Start a conversation with your followers and humanize your brand. But please, please, please skip the posts about “what’s your favorite product/service of ours?” unless you have raving fans.
Which of these options is right for you?
And what’s the best air/fuel mixture of those elements for your potential customers? That’s like asking a mechanic to tell you what’s wrong with your car on a blog post: we can go through some common scenarios, but until us social media experts can dig into your metrics, you won’t know your best plan of action. Your customers are telling you what they want to see on your social media. Your job is to listen.
Here’s one answer we know for sure.
They ultimately don’t want to hear about you. Your customers are looking for something that will enrich their lives. Your job is to figure out what that is and provide it. When you can hit that sweet spot, you have a social media strategy that’s worthy of someone’s time and attention.
