6 Ways to Improve Social Media Marketing & Consumption in 2018

As we come towards the end of the first month of a new year, it’s prime time to review some of the changes and discussions happening in and around social media to predict how we can effectively use these platforms and tools to share our important thoughts, or even better generate revenue, from our efforts.

Following is a selection of subjects that I think are worth considering this year, that are already generating a significant enough buzz for me to notice several viral posts discussing them:

1. Valuable Content 🤦

Content is such a buzzword.

Everybody is always saying that digital business success is all about great content. There’s plenty of articles online about creating great content. I see so many posts go viral just by milking the statement ‘create great content’, which is really a bit hypocritical.

In fact, I’m going to boycott it. Most ‘valuable’ content is usually one of two examples of marketing garb:

• Content made to convert you into a paying customer. These articles/videos usually give you a half-arsed rehash of something the writer read in a book, or a review of something, or stating the obvious and writing it in such a way that it sounds deep. They usually crop up in LinkedIn Pulse.

The strategy behind these will likely be nurturing/awareness, and so quality can often take a back step in the place of quantity. These posts will usually end with “if you liked this then please subscribe to my newsletter…”

(Note: I’m not dissing the CTA, saying they’re bad or unnecessary. I’m saying that if the content that comes before it is weak then it may have been a waste of time, or even worse made your brand seem completely unimaginative to the reader.)

What should you do better? Consider more long-form content (as in, maybe without a CTA), a la journalism, podcasts and documentary videos.

• Content made to go viral. With LinkedIn in mind specifically, there are tried and tested formulas which make it far easier for your posts to go viral. I’m going to call these ‘power content’ (like a cross between a power chord and a paraphrase) — and hope that it doesn’t catch on. Most haters are just calling it clickbait.

This stuff is made with one sole purpose — to go viral by generating likes, comments and shares. It works because it’s optimised for fast consumption and thoughtless clicks.

You know that stuff full of inspiration, quasi-controversy and line-breaks? They tend to end with something like “do you agree?” or “I challenge you to…”

It’s the fast food of social media, and it’s just as bad for you. It’s what makes you scroll, it’s what makes you spend hours of your day reading stuff, getting a dopamine kick and then realising you’ve lost hours of work and have actually gained no new knowledge.

It resonates with you because you know it already. You’re liking and commenting because you agree with it.

That’s not valuable content, that’s wasting people’s time.

Honestly, how many times does “stop doing things for likes” need to be said before it’s realised they’re fairly worthless?

So, what really makes great written content?

Opinion, perspective, passion, originality/personality/voice, uniqueness and [strangely often missed] a point or subject for the content to be about.

The ‘formulas’ or structure above can still work and be good content even if it is another write up of something that has been written about millions of times before, but it must be written with integrity and not just for the sake of churning out content.

If there is personality and a unique perspective, the content can still be great. Never make content written by ‘the brand’. It should always come from a person, with absolute creative freedom in mind.

2. Images 📷

The age of image-based social media marketing is beginning to deteriorate.

Through years of a picture being worth a thousand words, that value is on the decline.

With inspirational quotes, manufactured carbon copy selfie poses, overused tourist destinations, promotional offers, adverts and ‘discovery’ posts from people we don’t actually follow, we’re being overwhelmed with useless imagery.

I’m going to keep this one short…

If we’re posting images we should try to give every image we post its own artistic value.

My brain has begun auto-piloting to naturally skip over pictures and links when scrolling.

There’s so much imagery out there trying to grasp attention you have to really take effort now to know what’s there to be entertaining or what’s just there to make us want to buy something.

So now, I automatically assume that everything is trying to sell me something unless I have made the conscious effort to seek it beyond the feed.

So that’s useful. If you’re making truly ‘valuable’ (artistic) imagery, you want to find ways to encourage people to visit your page intentionally. That way they’re more likely to stop and ponder over things than give it a quick 2 seconds as they scroll through a feed.

And if you’re churning out loads of images to battle the algorithms and remain in your audiences mental space, you’ll be frequently fighting an uphill battle.

3. Facebook Algorithm Changes and How Social Media Can Improve for Users

The forthcoming changes to Facebook are a big topic of discussion at the moment. It’s meant to make the site more friendly for ‘personal content’, pushing brand and news content off of the primary feed.

Naturally, people are concerned what this means for businesses (and artists), assuming that they are going to suffer from the changes.

To me, the solution here seems fairly simple — get Facebook out of your digital marketing strategy.

Respect that there is a need for a more personal digital space where it is taboo for marketers and brands to impose.

Market somewhere else.

Encourage people to use their social media more intelligently.

Free them from their addiction by guiding them to consume specific things on specific platforms at different times, rather than trying to force feed them in every single place you know they are investing attention.

It’s your duty.

4. Adverts

This post is getting a bit of a theme around rubbish content in high quantities for the sake of owning attention, mind space and familiarity…

As a social media consumer, I like the advice I recently read to close the social media you’re on the first time you’re scrolling and see an advert.

If people are thinking this way, adverts are probably doing more harm than good. So, as marketers, we need to look at adverts in different ways.

If you’re part of a large enterprise then the focus of your ads may be purely for attention and familiarity, with plenty of dollar pumped into it. If that’s where you’re at, it’s unlikely this will be addressed. In this circumstance the brand is too huge to not follow the conventional ads strategy. Slipping on it could give your few competitors the space to steal your competition (again think Fast Food, Cola etc.)

For the rest of us, it may pay to consider running very specific campaigns with very clever/impressive messages, and not running the typical unimaginative advert campaign that solely exists to rehash your marketing material or product description over and over again.

Make your advertising campaign an artistic expression in its own right!

The best and most memorable adverts always told great stories or depicted great artistic investment.

5. SEO

I saw a viral Linkedin post stating that SEO is dead, to go on to state how content was the answer [although it never stated what the answer was to].

This is rubbish. More of that clickbait.

SEO is always going to bring your highest priority new leads. It brings traffic that’s looking for something specific, a problem you can solve — and that traffic finds you because you’ve put the right information on your site/blog/social media to rank for those searches.

The argument is that great content should be a higher priority than optimising design, meta data and keyword optimisation for your site. There is logic and sense in that. However, most people who are preaching for good content aren’t showing a good example of what good content is!

Almost always, ‘thought leaders’ are now optimising their ‘content’ for social media, rather than search engines. They want reach and interaction from as many people as possible by posting borderline generic posts that encourage interaction from as many people as possible to achieve a very far reach.

This is where the ‘great content’ movement is being driven from.

This is fine if you’re a self-development thought leader who’s work can be applied to everyone.

For the rest of us, that extended reach probably means that you’re reaching out of your target market and you’re giving yourself a false reading of interest in your brand.

Don’t chase the wrong metrics.

Optimise your content to reach the right people, not necessarily the most.

6. Dark Social 🖤

Dark social is awesome. It’s bringing the sense of community and exclusivity back into social media.

For brands, it’s absolutely all about groups… Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups… But again, you should approach these as a person and not a brand.

You can’t go in there looking for a sale, to ‘give value’ or ‘nurture’. If you’re part of one of these groups it’s because you’re either sharing a common enthusiasm for something the group is about, or you’ve been invited.

Use these groups as a way of enjoying something you love. Banter a bit, share useful things, ask questions, answer questions, and slowly but surely you might start seeing people within this group out in the world and have a mutual respect and a useful network.

• Act like you would at a dinner party
• Act like you would if you were a huge Marvel fan at Comic-con
• Treat your interaction with the group the same as you would an online video game [maturely]. — You’re there to communicate and play a game with some people you don’t know very well, who all have a common interest in the game. You may walk away with some new friends at the end of the game, you may not. You have to be free from intentions or expectations.

Summary

I think it’s fair to say that my beliefs are that we should be taking social media less seriously and be less inclined to invest too much into it for it’s own sake.

Let’s get really passionate about the things that we love and spend less time on things we don’t.

Value people and relationships, never forget technology is a tool to help not a stimulation/simulation or excuse to be less sociable.

Be sociable, not social.

Stop interacting with things you don’t like — it only fuels the fire and spreads it like wildfire through your network. Viral content is a virus. If you don’t like something, hide it — don’t comment.

A final thought:

Why don’t any online media providers seems to offer a ranking algorithm that goes into negatives and then hides/greatly reduces the visibility of the negative content.

Wouldn’t that be a good solution / incentive to hide hate speech / bad content etc?

Did you enjoy reading this article? I’m really keen to get more people talking about making business and art work together harmoniously. Please share this article wherever you see fit! 🐧🎶 Follow me on Twitter for more! 😎