Many people are scared to share what they know on social media. They worry that others will steal this knowledge, those ideas. However, the best ideas require work, patience, and perseverance. To most people, those things are more frightening than a clown carrying a bloody ax. This brings the odds of theft happening way down.
I am continually surprised at the number of businesses that throw up (sometimes literally) just anything for a post and then are surprised when people don't give it attention. If you didn't care about what you are posting, why should your followers?
Create posts for yourself and your followers. Don't create posts for the platform.
Unfortunately a lot of people do the latter. They post with the goal of pleasing whatever algorithm runs the social media site they are on. And when the algorithm changes, they change their content to please the new algorithm. I have seen content that makes a site's algorithm ridiculously happy, but that does nothing for the person posting it or the person reading it. Social media stats really don't tell you much.
With social media you can theoretically see how many people saw your post. (I say "theoretically" because you don't know if they are giving you accurate numbers or not.) There is even the eye candy of the total number of likes and shares. And while it is somewhat better data than you get from, say, a magazine ad, it is still just eye candy. There are so many people out there who, when they see content that they like, don't do anything. They don't click like, they don't comment, and they don't share. Why? Because they don't have to. They grew up in a world where, after you read an article you liked, you put the magazine down and that was the end of it. Maybe you mentioned it to a friend, but you did not document this communication in any way. No matter what the platform is, the total number of likes you get for a post is not an accurate measurement of the number of people who read it and liked it. And it is definitely not an accurate measurement of the number of people who read your post and thought about it. Social media, blogs, and such are incredibly powerful and valuable ways of communicating with your audience, fans, or customers. However, there is no good way to measure any of it yet. Occasionally I will look through online articles and blog posts about social media marketing. They usually have titles like "10 Ways To Get Amazing Facebook Numbers!". It is a style stolen from vanity magazines that have headlines like "5 Tips For Driving Women Wild!", which sounds like it was written by someone who has restraining orders against him.
I find a good test for these articles is to compare them with someone's social media you admire. For instance, I think the gold standard for social media is Humans Of New York (HONY). When I compare HONY with what these articles suggest, they never match up. The articles say "have calls to action", "ask lots of questions", "do live video regularly." HONY does none of this and their engagement is far above the pages I see using these tactics. HONY posts quality content consistently. It is straight forward, but it's not easy. If your goal in creating social media content is to beat the site's algorithm, you are going to crank out a large quantity of crap.
From Seth Godin's book "The Icarus Deception" - "I don't care how many friends you have on Facebook or how many followers you have on Twitter... I care about how much people will miss you if you're not back here again tomorrow."
Facebook admitted to artificially inflating its video stats. It is a reminder that sometimes there is not much difference between a social media company report and the average online dating profile. Both have the kind of exaggerations normally only found in Greek mythology. "The social networking site PDQ announced that every post on its site is read by one million people. They also said that their CEO recently defeated a 20 foot tall cyclops using only his brute strength and a carrot peeler."
Most people put less thought into their social media posts than they do into the end-user license agreements they click through. "What do you mean the software company can now legally shoot my pets?!"
If you put a few minutes of care and thought into what you are posting, your social media content will be at a much higher level than most people's. - Cris |
AuthorCris Cohen Archives
March 2021
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