Lately, I've been working with a number of organisations on how to leverage social media to help define their brand. And what I've come to realise, is that most brands are not using social media intelligently. Rather than thinking about what role they want social channels to play in delivering the brand's promise, while satisfying key business objectives, they begin yelling, trying to out-post the competition. Sadly, this results in either upset followers, who then unfollow those brands or, worse, they become jaded and skim over anything those brands have to say, as followers become conditioned to believe that it's another meaningless piece of branded content.
Brands need to smarten up, and have more realisations like the one my client had last week, where they said, 'for too long we thought social media was a free place to post all the stuff we didn't have budget for...but to do it right, it requires budget, focus and effort' - Amen!
So, rather than trying so hard to engage with consumers, which results in a ton of meaningless content pushed onto people, let's be more precious with those moments to engage. What do I mean by this? I'm talking about Precious Posting - engage with purpose, less often and with greater impact!
Treat engagement on social channels like a beating heart...if your heart beats too fast, it's unable to push an adequate amount of blood through your body, making it work harder and, over time, causes stress to the heart which may lead to heart failure down the line. But if your heart stops completely...well, we know what happens then. So really, you should have a steady heart rate with adequate pauses between beats, allowing each beat to be strong enough to push the right amount of blood through your body.
This works the same for engaging with people online. If a brand pumps out tons of 'engaging' content everyday, followers eventually just skim over the content because it becomes overwhelming. Then the brand works even harder to get its message heard/experienced for little to no impact. On the flip side, if a brand isn't present on social channels, it won't appear on people's radars one bit, making the brand irrelevant compared to its competition, who is present.
So, what's the happy medium?
It's to engage with followers when the brand actually has something to say. Don't post anything that doesn't serve a purpose. It must engage with followers in a way that is useful to them and contains a singular message, so not to confuse or overwhelm them. Then, during the times you aren't doing anything new and noteworthy, stay quite. Continue to create meaningful content, but on a significantly lower frequency.
With Precious Posting in social media, brand's are able to put more energy towards creating truly remarkable moments of engagement, during periods that are important to the organisation and the followers. This results in greater standout among the competition, because rather than just pushing out lots of average content, your brand will push out one amazing thing, that is relevant to your followers, capturing their attention and stimulating the domino effect of organic reach as they share the cool thing your brand just did.
So before you decide you need to be in social channels, ask yourself why? And what role can your brand play in this space? If you decide it's the right place for your brand, be considered with your engagement and only post when you have something of merit going on to maximise your impact.
Make each post precious!
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