Social Media is Crowded, Noisy, and Often Impersonal.
With so many brands, influencers, and woman-yelling-at-cat memes available to consumers online, creating meaningful content on your social media platforms is becoming even more important.
Gary Vaynerchuk calls it “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook“. Creating valuable content and engaging with your customers more than you try selling them something.
People know when they’re being sold and social media gives them a lot of power to silence the noise. They can simply scroll right past your sales pitch or even more drastic: stop following you!
We Need A Break – It’s Not You, It’s me
There are over 3.4 billion users on social media globally, which is about a 10% increase compared to 2019. Almost half of the world, 45% of the population, is on social media.
Yet with all those users, more and more people are choosing to take a “social media fast” or “digital detox”. They’re deleting social media apps off their mobile devices, tracking how much time they spend on social media, and completely stepping away from it altogether. Facebook is seeing a huge decline in users but Instagram is attracting more.
With users engaging on social media more purposefully, the need to create more meaningful, valuable content is at an all-time high. The rise of minimalism or “essentialism” among millennials leaves them craving content more content tuned-in to their needs.
They are focusing more on their mental health and productivity and less time on their “likes” and comments.
Building Communities – Not Just Customers
A large part of meaningful and valuable experiences online is the way you engage with your audience. While sharing posts that you believe target your audience is part of maintaining your social presence and relevance, you also need to consider how to create posts that encourage and cultivate interactions beyond the simple like or share.
Building communities around content isn’t a new idea, but they are being built by brands in different ways which is paying off and will likely continue to do so moving forward.
One of my favorite podcasts, The Weekly Planet, has a large audience of listeners that tune-in every week for their commentary on entertainment news and movie reviews.
They’ve also cultivated a huge Facebook group of over 9,300 users where they can interact with their listeners – which they often reference in their podcast. This creates a level of trust, loyalty, and camaraderie beyond just having their weekly show and Facebook page.
Building your community is simple – but not always easy. You need to address the following:
- Who is your audience
- Knowing when users are online
- What interests and challenges do they have
- How do you or can you solve problems for them
Purpose > Metrics
Simon Sinek, author and speaker, says, “Traditional Metrics Will Reflect Purpose Over Time“.
In the early days of social media, it was all about clicks, clicks, clicks – how many “likes” and followers could you get in X amount of time. Today, we seeing a shift to more purpose-driven content and less of a focus on the metrics behind them. In his talk, Simon illustrates this with a story of when he was invited to the Pentagon.
He describes an interaction with a high-ranking General. They make small-talk in the hallway on their way to the meeting and abruptly end their chat as soon as they enter the room.
In that conversation, the General tells Simon that he has recommended and shared Simon’s book with all his staff. Simon responds, “Thanks, tell that to my publisher”. To which the General responds that he didn’t buy all of his staff a copy but rather he shared his copy with them.
On the other hand, Simon is often invited to speak a large conferences where they giveaway hundreds of free books – which Simon retorts, “that are used as cupholders after the conference”.
The metrics behind this shows hundreds of books sold but no impact. Whereas with the General, it’s one book sold but numerous impact among his staff – who would later recommend and share they book with their friends.
Being purpose led is not the absence of metrics – it’s prioritizing the purpose before the metrics. The organizations that do this will, over time, demonstrate better metrics.
Consistency is Key
It’s the mantra we hear over and over, yet so often fail to employ. If you want to not only grow your audience but create meaningful content, you have to actually create content, consistently.
The growth and engagement won’t happen overnight, but building a catalog of content shows your audience you’re serious about the topics you’re passionate about sharing.
At Venture Studio, we have a goal of no less than three posts across multiple social media platforms per day. We strive to share with our audience content that will be beneficial to their business or personal growth. By providing this content to our audience daily we’ve seen a tremendous growth on our own platforms.
