The Medium is the message: How to stay relevant without spreading yourself too thin on social platforms that make no sense for your brand.
Every year – or, at least, every couple of years – a novel digital platform rears its glitzy head and business owners around the globe attempt to hop on the brand-new social bandwagon. Caught up in the excitement of evocative emojis and stylish influencers, companies chase the next social high by attempting to transition their messaging from one platform to the newbie. The result is often too thinly spread resources and content that just doesn’t quite jive with the audiences it encounters.
While, as a digital marketing agency, we obviously love the socials, our team is the first to offer tales of caution to our clients about this shotgun approach to social media management. Rather than just firing without aim or the right ammo, we strongly suggest you approach online content creation with the targeted loving care your products and services demand.
When deciding what & where to share, we want you to keep in mind the following:
- Who are your target audiences and which platforms are they using?
- How do they use each platform (i.e., for what purpose are they on there?)
- Are they sharing text or copy-based messages? Videos?
- Do they directly interact with one another or just share en masse for attention?
- Does the platform offer e-commerce options and how will they (or will they not) work for what you are offering?
- Why do you think it’s a good idea to use that platform?
- Hint: because you saw someone reference it once or were told by a neighbour to do so are NOT valid reasons
- Do you have the human power to customize your content to each platform?
- Will tackling another social entity really help you achieve your business objectives?
- Pro tip: likes and shares are like shiny things – cool, but not always useful and tend to turn out to be gilded gold if not leverage strategically
As you can likely gauge from the tone of our questioning, we really want you to carefully consider the ROI of a collage of social platforms. If your products are designed for seasoned business professionals, ages 40-59, there is no reason you should be using a platform that less than 15% of your target audiences make appearances on.
The reason for this is because it’s better to do one or two things really well than to do three or four half-assed-ly (definitely not a word). This is especially true when it comes to social media because it is frigging hard work and demands a great deal of talent and dedication. Arguably making this very true statement even more true is the fact that today’s online audiences are savvy AF and will cancel brands for nothing more than a poorly placed eggplant emoji.
If you are going to put content out there, it should be original and representative of who you are. This requires the creative genius of a copywriter and designer who are going to generate posts that align with your brand standards and demonstrate relevancy to your target audiences. More than that, it demands the time required to interact with your audiences because there is nothing worse than unrequited engagement online (except maybe the aforementioned eggplant emoji).
Think of social media management like you would choosing an outfit
Simply putting on every piece of clothing you own does not create a great look. Choose thoughtfully, design carefully and don’t let trends replace the timeless components of great style (and, in this case, brand communications).
Instead of learning a new song and dance in a desperate attempt to stay relevant (we are looking at you, Boomer who is selling their soul on Tik Tok), let’s chat about how our digital marketing agency can help you make sense of the current social scene and leverage key platforms to achieve your business goals. For a sense of one of the services we offer to enhance your social skills, we’ve provided a little description of the training we can provide to your team below:
Social Media Training
Meet with our Digital Strategist for up to two hours of social media training. During the session, you will discuss best practices for your business and industry, including which platforms and software best align with your unique needs. Additionally, you will chat about how to build a forward-looking digital marketing strategy. Our digital maven will walk you through our social media guide and ensure you are clear on how to wield it for social media domination. Plus, you get to keep a copy for future use, so that is pretty awesome.
