The best advice is often to use trial and error testing to figure out what works and what doesn’t. However, your social media campaign will have a bigger impact if you better understand how the social media platforms judge, rank and recommend your content.
This article doesn’t offer simple digestible (bland) tips on upgrading your social media strategy. This article offers a deeper dive into what works and why.
1. Understand Content-Viewer Paid and Organic Attention
There is a dynamic that most social media platforms employ, and it goes a little like this. If you have 100 followers, and you post something that most of them like. Perhaps they watch it all the way through, click like, comment, etc.
If those people like the content, it is recommended to a small group of other people. If they love the content, more than your original 100 followers, then the content is passed on to other people. If they super-love the content, then it goes viral.
However, if you post something and promote it through the paid advertising platform owned by the social media network, then your content is seen by vast amounts of other people.
However, the data is not used to judge the popularity of your content (in most cases, unless it looks like it too may go viral). Instead, your content is judged the next time those same people see your content.
In those cases, you gain more followers, likes and more recommendations from the social media platform.
Though it seems counter-intuitive, you don’t need a lot of followers to become popular on social media. You don’t need a lot of followers to gain influence.
Having a lot of followers isn’t a bad thing, but it certainly shouldn’t be your overall goal on social media because the content itself is what gets you recommended.
2. Gain Traction Before Investing Big Money into Your Content
You need a pool of followers and people who like your content. You need attention from other people on the social media platforms of your choice. Think of them as the kindling to your fire.
If you do not have a lot of followers, and you are not getting interest from other websites, or are not paying the social media platforms, then you need to get attention from somewhere.
If you get attention (from anywhere), then your content begins to gain traction. Your channels start to get momentum, after which it becomes easier to attract more attention as your campaign grows in size and success.
Try social media marketplaces if you are struggling to get consistent attention from other sources. There are companies like Fameswap where people can sell their social media profiles. People, influencers and businesses buy these social media profiles because they already have a built-in audience.
You post to your new account, you direct people to your social media profiles, and you gain attention that way. So, let’s say you buy Jenny’s YouTube account and she has 30,000 subscribers.
You now own her YouTube account and you can do two things. You can start posting adverts to her account with the hopes of getting direct sales or getting people to your website.
Or, you can post content that encourages people to visit your social media profiles and subscribe to them. Either way, you get the attention you require so that you can start building momentum with your social media campaigns.
3. When You Should Use Bots
There was an old trick on YouTube where you set off your content, but you kept it unlisted. You paid for bots to swarm the content, and then when you published, it looked like you had lots of attention very quickly, so YouTube recommended you everywhere and you went viral.
That was an old YouTube hack that doesn’t work anymore.
These days, paying for likes, followers and such is not a great idea. Remember from tip one about how the social media platforms judge your content’s popularity.
If most of your followers are just bots, and you publish content, and they are not watching it through, clicking like, etc., then the social media platform will assume your content is garbage and won’t recommend it to other people.
However, there are a few occasions where buying likes and follows is a good idea, and it is used all the time with Disney movie trailers. In short, they buy a bunch of likes and follows to make a product, idea, or trailer, seem more popular than it is.
For example, if you release a video about your wonder broom that cleans and polishes a floor, buying several thousand views and likes for your video demonstration/advert will make your product and service look better than it is.
On the flip side, if you claim to sell the world’s best broom, but your video advert only has 3 likes and 10 views, then it doesn’t look very good. Again, if you claim to be a big, popular and long-established company, but you only have 300 followers, it doesn’t look too good.
4. Never Underestimate Your Target Consumer
This is quite the brain melter when you consider the logic. Imagine you are running a small to medium eCommerce business, and you want to attract loyal customers. You see some advice about short-form crappy content, copying people’s work, bot attracting and so forth, and you go ahead and do it.
If somebody told you that displaying topless women in your bike store would get you attention, you would probably believe it, but you certainly wouldn’t do it.
Yet, there are people out there taking the advice of TikTok and YouTube spammers and then wondering why they cannot drive a single sale from their 300K followers.
If you honestly think you are going to create long-term customers because you flipped the orientation on 30 other people’s content and added a “Watz Up Wid Dat?” at the end, then let’s hope you are targeting not-so-smart-people because they are the only ones who will buy.
It may bother you that the people who post 15 times per day across their accounts are somehow getting lots of followers and likes, but they are only attracting causal crowds and bots.
There are bots that try to sway what subjects trend, but most are just follow-you follow-me bots and fake-engagement bots. The people churning out 15 posts per day are pumping out garbage or repurposed/reused stuff, and real buying customers are smart enough to see through it.
5. Get To The Point
The slow erosion of introductions, the slow erosion of begging for likes/subscribers is still happening, but it is slowly becoming less common.
Just take a look at the biggest influencers, especially the businesses, and see how their long-introductions are becoming much shorter. Look at how their asking for likes and subscribers is becoming more sheepish.
Brevity and conciseness are the only way to survive a heavily competitive future. Get to the point and give me maximum value now, because if you don’t, then the next person will.
In such a highly competitive marketplace, you not only need to please your targets, you need to please them quickly.
6. Lose The Cheap Tricks That Will Scare Away Your Target Audience
The fact that companies still do this sort of thing, even big companies, is crazy. Stop things like polls, giveaways, shout-outs, viewer mail, and all that stupid crap that Facebook promoters have convinced you works. How is giving away a free mug going to get you more motorbike customers?
The developers of the game State of Decay 2 were doing live streams to promote their updates. Before each update, they spent five cringe-filled minutes saying how they were giving away the same place mats that you see in the game.
It was embarrassing, especially when you consider that the people watching the live stream were there expressly because they wanted out hear about the game.
They were already in the park, they had already bought the ticket, and the developers were trying to level up their engagement with silly promotional nonsense.
It was cringe-worthy and embarrassing, and yet it is 100% guaranteed that there is a marketing expert somewhere patting himself/herself on the back for their user engagement tricks to fool us dopes who were dumb enough to watch the live streams.
7. You Have Plenty of Content-Making Opportunities
Right now, there are people out there who are making YouTube and TikTok videos where they unbox your items. There are people answering questions about your products on social media.
There are people reviewing your products and services, and people running tutorials on your products and services. Why give them all the viewers and attention when you could be making this content yourself.
You can even go further and run favorable comparisons with your competitors. In addition, you can test out your own products, but you can go to the extreme and test out ten under the most pressurized conditions.
You can afford to do all of these things, and you can afford to do things to your products that other people wouldn’t.
There are plenty of ways to make content that relates to your products and services, and the weird thing is that if you don’t do the reviews, the unboxings, etc., then other people are going to do it for you (and probably less favorably).
