Social media is the hottest new kid on the block. Businesses are starting to see the big boom in social selling and fighting neck-and-neck to catch onto the new kid. But few really understand what it takes to rope in the new kid and win the game.
You might think that the bigwigs have got the right social media strategies in the bag. Sure, some of these businesses may have a stellar offline presence, but they struggle to translate their stature into the digital world.
In fact the truth is, many global giants, digital marketing companies, startups, professional creators and even social media agencies muddle up their social media strategy. Decision makers burn up countless hours, hire unnecessary team members and exhaust thousands of dollars on their social media, only to get minimum value for the money spent.
It’s like shelling out to get a Louis Vuitton bag, to only end up getting one of those grubby badly-stitched duplicates in return. You don’t get what you paid for.
If your social media isn’t not churning ROI, look back and analyse what you’re doing wrong.
1. Do your posts fit in?
Organic advertising is the future of marketing. Your post must fit in with other posts on your feed. Note what type of content users post on each social media platform. Each social media platform has its own unique characteristics. For example, TikTok is infamous for short meme videos and YouTube is known for longer storytelling-format videos.
Recommendations: Repurpose your post for each social media platform, to ensure it fits in with other organic content. You cannot create a 1 hour video and post the same video on all social media channels. You might have to repurpose the 1 hour video into a 10 second meme ad on TikTok and a longer 2 minute story ad on YouTube.
For example, Guesture, an Indian company that provides rental housing, wins brownie points for creating an “skippable” YouTube ad on coliving spaces. The ad’s storytelling format and short 2:30 minute timeframe blends in beautifully with YouTube’s content.
2. Are you taking too much time creating posts?
Just because it’s pretty, doesn’t mean it sells. You could spend hours creating a post that flaunts the most beautiful colours and imagery, but branding and aesthetics isn’t enough to make the cut. You want your social media to churn tangible ROI. Instead, you could use smarter strategies and churn at least 10-20 more impactful posts an hour.
Recommendation: Don’t waste time designing your post image. If you’re promoting your restaurant, just post simple images of your restaurant ambience, food or chefs who make your food great. If you don’t have an image bank ready, just curate images from other public Instagram accounts or content curation platforms like Giphy. Remember to credit these images or get their permission to repost if necessary. This is a great way to reach out to a new audience, facilitate cross-promotion and recognize amazing creators.
Latermedia does an excellent job curating content that matches their colourful brand palette on Instagram. Their content appeals to both B2B and B2C consumers.
3. Are you shoving too much text on your image?
Stay away from traditional flyer-like and brochure-like posts spilling over with text and a gazillion call-to-actions. Social media is different from traditional print or digital ads. Contrary to popular misconception, it’s completely fine if your social media image displays absolutely no text. By this, we mean no text is better than too much text. Pictures speak louder than words, so let your post caption do the talking.
Besides, most social media platforms will not boost posts that exceed 20% text. If your post can potentially reach 10,000 people, you will cut down the post reach to 2000 if you cram in too much text.
Recommendations: Minimalism is EVERYTHING. If you’re promoting an event, don’t clutter your image with logos, date, time, venue and other irrelevant content that simply does not grab attention or boost conversions. Put yourself in the viewer’s shoes and create a buyer journey for each audience set.
In a logical sequence, your customer will first want to know what your event is about. Only after this initial hook, would customers want to click on an image to know more about further details like the event date, day and time. Your landing page must cover these specific details. If you don’t have a landing page, you can put the information in your image caption.
Your image must only display your event’s unique selling point, which could be an interesting topic a speaker in the event is covering and the speaker’s name and designation. If your audience is interested in your post, they are going to click on your landing page link or read the caption to know more.
❌Wrong
✅ Right
4. Is your content not grabbing attention?
Stay away from ambiguous and eloquent language. Sugary charms aren’t going to do you any good on social media. People consume short content on social media. You only have 1-3 seconds to grab your audience’s attention. Complex jargons and flowery language are a big no-no. People should not have to read your post more than once to understand it.
Recommendation: Use simple, short, powerful keywords to reel your audience in. Especially if you’re creating a paid ad, keep your caption under 2-3 lines. Here’s an example.
❌Wrong: Embellish your facial features with our beautiful products. On account of Independence Day, we are giving you 20% off our lovely products for your beautiful face.
✅ Right: Independence day sale alert! Flat 20% on discount on all facial products! Fill up your shopping cart. 🛒💲
5. Are you posting the right balance of sales:value posts?
Stop using call-to-actions on every post. You need to create content that provides value to your audience. If you’re only posting content with redundant call-to-actions to sell your products, this may potentially drive your audience away from your company. Don’t be surprised if your “unfollow” rate skyrockets.
Recommendations: Post a good cross-section of humor, insights, trends and entertaining content along with your pillar call-to-action posts. We recommended maintaining a 20:80 ratio of sales:value-driven posts. For example, if you’re posting 7 posts a week, only post one or a maximum of two sales posts with call-to-actions per week.
6. Do you have a T-shaped social media professional onboard?
Many startups hire a handful of writers, designers, account executives, branding managers and digital marketing specialists to handle one single social media account, when they don’t have the budget for it. You don’t need an entire team to work on your social media. What if we told you that we’ve personally worked with professionals who have single-handedly managed 10+ social media accounts simultaneously in a month!
Recommendation: What you need to be looking out for are T-shaped professionals who are experts at writing and are also capable of handling multiple analytics, business and design related tasks. There are plenty of self-help platforms like Canva for non-technical professionals, that simplify complex jobs like using design software. And that’s how t-shaped professionals use savvy strategies to deliver maximum results.
7. Are you investing in the right automation tools?
Technology is evolving and so should you. Yet, many decision makers don’t trust using automation tools, and would rather spend thrice more to hire a person to do the same job.
For instance, say you’re paying an employee 10,000 INR a month to do your social media marketing. The employee spends 7 hours a day following the target audience, engaging with posts and commenting on threads. Yet, your page only gets 1-10 followers and post likes. On the other hand, if you spend a quarter of your budget, say INR 1000-3000 on automation tools, you could potentially boost your page follows and post likes to 100 a day.
Recommendation: Invest in social media automation tools like Onlypult, Hootsuite, BuzzSumo, Sprout Social, Follow Liker and Social Baker that are more reliable, accurate and faster than manual human labour.
If you’re repeating the same strategies over and over again without getting results, it’s time to evolve and adapt with the changing times. Just because the bigwigs are using a particular strategy, doesn’t mean you should too. Those agencies could be making the wrong moves. The biggest mistake you can make is to be a follower and not an innovator.
Ask yourself – do you want to be just another company scraping to get by on social media or do you want to use your power to harness change for exponential growth?
Reinvent your social media game and go viral! Visit The Soar Media to get started.
