A Case of Dividing Content Personae into Different Channel

The curious rant about analyzing human behavior on the big 4 social media: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Different Channel, Different Norm

For those who have internet connection, we all have that one friend — or even yourself — who cherry-pick their content to be uploaded on different social media. We can’t blame them; the social media have its own norms and policy to subtly tell us to act according to their environment. Recall that recent Facebook controversial Facebook Real Name Policy, or Twitter’s decision to ban any Username Squatting Policy due to the illegal business on Username transaction between handle miners and brand owners.

Those norms unconsciously shape the way we interact and represent our digital persona — e.g. on LinkedIn, different career aspiration have different ways to “fit-in”. The lower the entry barrier for non-friends to access our account, it’s more likely for us to put our persona into a formal identity.

Personally, I differentiate my persona into four types of contents:

  1. Curated YOLO content: for Instagram
  2. Sarcastic yet witty content: for Twitter
  3. Kid-Friendly: for Facebook
  4. Portfolio only: LinkedIn

Each social media has different set of followers.

My parents and my long-lost relatives scrutinize the updates of my life on Facebook. My friends and my colleagues double-tap my heavily-edited bottomless holiday pictures. My anonymous followers retweet and like meme contents that I made. And last, the all-favorite social media for prospect hunters — LinkedIn.

Recently, I stumbled on the research paper published on Arxiv by Zhong et al. that argues on the different “Social Hat” for different social contexts.

With this phenomenon on content control, I can’t stress enough the importance of content differentiation for brands to market their product. Social media create limitation for brand owners to limit their ad creativity for several reasons.

Say, Facebook with its strict advertising policy that might lower the impression or reach to the targeted users if the content contains too much text. The implication of this policy, brand owners turn their head from classic marketing strategy — hard-selling, all-out promotion, A-Z terms and conditions — into entertaining ads (with clear Call To Action, of course!).

The lingering problem for brand owners, they put too much effort on creating creative, soft-selling content. They don’t map out different story line for each social media.

Ideally, different “Social Hats” require users to pick contents that suite their personal branding. I envy the brand relationship between Mojok.co and Tirto.id on Twitter. Twitter allow us to engage on the community by simple features e.g. thread, direct reply on the tweet (like Tirto.id did on Mojok.co’s tweet), counts of Retweet, Like, and Reply.

Several brand owners blame social media if their content did not “viral” enough, even though the content that they have created is already sufficient — filled with information, witty, soft-selling, subtle yet clear Call To Action. But they couldn’t figure out what makes their followers “tick” and even re-post the content to their profile.

Source: socialmediatoday.com, The Current State of Social Media Algorithms (April 2018)

The classic case of, “That Won’t Go Well With Our Brand Guideline” usually found as the main problem on not replying publicly to the comments. In this era, users want organic engagement. Plus, the algorithm of social media will increase the chance of impression and reach if you actively involved with the post by replying comments with text, not emoji, etc.

Basically, we’re back to the age of forum with no-name moderators. There are implicit norms you should follow; whether you’re just a simple user like me, or you are working as a social media strategist.

What are your true-and-tested social media viral trick that involves creating niche content?

Ragil Caitra Larasati

Written by

Data Analyst | FEB UI 2011 | Marketing Management | Jakarta, Indonesia

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