Stop Playing The "liking" game
What’s your goal with your social media accounts?
Establish expertise or grow impressions, likes and comments?
When you play close attention, the dynamics, tendencies and behaviors of folks who follow you on social media is really fascinating to watch unfold.
Every weekend - well, most weekends - I like to use that time on my socials to post content that’s generally lighter and more geared towards entertaining or providing food for thought with non-business related questions or statements.
Sometimes, it’ll be a post related to health and nutrition, a selfie of me doing something interesting, a cigar or spirit photo, an event I attended, a funny observation while walking on the street, some kind of fun development in my life, a silly comment or activity, or something else non-related to the speaker, author and coach community.
Although these posts are not geared towards inspiring or educating those I serve in the way my regular posts are written, they are written in my voice and display aspects of my sunshiney personality, :)
So they, nonetheless, are still an important piece to building the online presence puzzle.
Recently, I’ve started to look a little more closely at these weekend posts, and noticed something quite interesting.
That is, they consistently outperform the expertise and business-minded posts that I actually spend a lot more time writing.
In some cases, the weekend posts are delivering more than double the average amount of likes, and 4-5 comments MORE than the day-to--day posts.
And, that’s not just one platform, it’s all of them.
Why?
Well, from what I can tell, the weekend posts are much more easily digestible for viewers to consume and react. I usually write half a novel for my social posts, and the weekend ones are more relaxed, so, it’s an easier process for someone to dive into it.
Also, the weekend posts are more mind candy that leave people with a good feeling than value added through deeply dissecting an insight, so, there’s that, as well.
This acknowledgement and recognition leaves me wondering:
Is it better to abandon the longer, more time consuming, expertise-driven posts and replace them with weekend posts 7 days a week?
Pondering the answer to this question leads to an even more important question:
Am I building a presence on social media to get likes, comments and shares from anyone and everyone, or am I here to appeal to a highly niched group of folks by providing them with content that informs and inspires them into action, when they are ready to consume it on their own time?
All very interesting questions
At the end of the day, my goal is not to get 10,000 likes and 500 shares. I don’t need a community that large with that type of engagement in order to run a successful business.
Now, some people do, but, I’m not an online influencer who is paid by big brands to sell product places goods. My goal is to have somewhere between 20-30 clients TOTAL per year.
As a result, I don’t need to grow a gargantuan community that will produce those types of numbers.
I want people to follow me because I help them with their challenges and roadblocks built around their image content, not just because I want their likes, comments and shares.
Having said that, looking at the performance of those weekend posts has shown me very clearly that there is a lot of room for growth with respect to the audience that I serve.
What I mean is that I need to do a better job of curating my content in a way that it gets in front of the right sets of eyeballs to get them engaged and interested in following my feeds.
How can I do that?
First on the list is to shake up my hashtag game and see if some new tags will bring in a set of fresh eyes.
Next, I need to do a lot more listening to conversations and making more friends through these conversations. That means looking at some of the current conversations happening in the hashtags I or my colleagues are using, and engage them then and there.
Yes, social media is, in fact, a long-game, which is quite evident in this observation about my own work.
But, it becomes a much more effective endeavor when you allow yourself the opportunity to observe what’s going on, identify the issues and sticky points, and develop a strategy to course correct and continue on the path.
I hope to have some good news in a month, and will keep you posted on the developments.
PS - For those of you who aren’t in the know, I mail out these blogs 3x a week, and lemme tell you, they’re a real party, so, if you’d like to get in on this,sign up for it here and I’ll throw in a free gift for you, because I care, :)