Being Content with your Content
How to Embrace the Process + Not Quit Social Media Marketing 3 Days In
We live in a world of instant gratification.
We want to ask a question and get an immediate answer. When you order food, you want it in front of you in the quickest amount of time possible. When I post something on social media, I start worrying if the likes don’t start rolling in the second I post it.
However, with high expectations comes the high possibility of being let down. And when you start building a brand on social media, obviously you want people to get behind it. But let’s get real.
You’re not going to gain a large amount of followers right off the back, not every post is going to blow up, and you’ll probably have a bunch of dead posts before you post something that gains significant engagement. That could be over the course of weeks or even months.
Not knowing these things, it could be easy to feel like you‘re ready to give up while you’re just getting started. But like most things, social media marketing is a process — and processes take time.
To embrace the process and not quit social media marketing three days in, I encourage you to not overthink your content. Don’t get me wrong. What you post is important. But whether it’s good content or not is subjective.
I’ve seen this play out time and time again. Last December, in my role as Young Life’s Digital Marketing Specialist, I posted Young Life’s most-liked Instagram photo of all time. Can you guess what it was of?
A puppy.
As I’ve gotten to know Young Life’s audience more and more, I’ve come to understand what things will make them pop: puppies, beautiful camp landscapes, and, of course, big chocolate chip cookies topped with ice cream. This is also where I’ve realized likes are superficial.
Know your audience, but also know your story. There are going to be some posts that you know aren’t going to perform as well likes-wise, but they’re still stories worth telling because they’re core to your brand.
Young Life is a Christian global youth ministry that exists all over the U.S. and in over 100 countries around the world. If I limited our message to only puppies and big cookies, we wouldn’t be Young Life. But it’s also important to recognize that meaningful engagements rarely manifest in the form of likes.
I like the way John-Erik Moseler 🚀 breaks it down here:
- A like = a high✋ five
- A comment = a conversation (people fall in ❤️ love over conversations)
- A share = 👏 word of mouth
At the end of February, I got to go to New York City and highlight various Young Life ministries there. While allowing our audience to see that Young Life in NYC is similar to Young Life in other parts of the world, I also wanted to highlight the uniqueness of Young Life in NYC by highlighting individual people’s stories.
Even though the post didn’t bring in puppy numbers, I was pleasantly surprised to see what was going down in the comments.
While highlighting Young Life in NYC didn’t allow for everybody to feel a part of the story, it did invite someone who had been involved with Young Life for a while to get involved in a new area. That’s the power of online interactions leading to fuller offline experiences. And it often goes unseen because it’s not a sexy metric like likes or views.
Take heart. The true value of your social media posts oftentimes isn’t going to show up in likes or views; it’s going to show up in comments, shares, direct messages, or word-of-mouth referrals, which typically won’t happen under your watch.
But even with those meaningful engagements, it’s most likely going to take some time before you get to a point where those engagements are actually happening. Embrace the process. Stay consistent because consistency creates opportunities for engagement. Also, don’t expect to go big off your first hit. It’s steadily painting a picture rather than printing Mona Lisa off the Internet.
