Welcome, everyone. My name is Justine Sanborn. I am an instructor at Noble Desktop, and today we are going to be talking about social media. Specifically, we want to discuss how to make an engaging and lasting impact on social media. Hopefully, this seminar will provide you with some insightful information that can help you build your brand online.
Overview & The Four Fundamentals of Social Media
The first thing that we're going to start with is a quote from one of the most notable creators on YouTube, Jenna Marbles. She has been creating content on YouTube for over ten years, and she has a really impactful quote to help you think how to present yourself on social media. She said, “The single greatest gift you could ever give the world is to be exactly who you are.” As you’re watching this presentation, I want you to think about who you are and what your brand is.
With those ideas in mind, let’s take a look at this screenshot from Apple’s Instagram account from a couple months back. This particular campaign was really impactful because it incorporated everyday individuals who were simply using their iPhone to shoot really powerful, engaging photography. This process started with the hashtag #HotShotOnAniPhone, which you could still absolutely use even though the campaign is no longer running. This was a really powerful and highly trafficked campaign.
Whether you’re starting a company or you’re just marketing yourself, the important thing is to be as personable as possible on social media. And what better way to be personable with your content than to share the stories of people who use your product with others? It was a really amazing campaign that Apple did.
We’re now going to move on to the Four Fundamentals of Social Media. These are the things that you should ideally consider before you get yourself started. But, even if you have started your social media presence, you can review these fundamental concepts and apply them to what you're already doing to hopefully improve your current situation.
Number one is to determine the right social media platform for your goals. Not every platform is going to meet your needs in the same way, so you want to ensure that the platform you choose is going to be advantageous for the content that you intend on sharing. Number two is to develop a successful social media strategy. Although viral content still exists, very rarely is it something that was completely unexpected. The people who create this content may say there wasn’t a strategy, but oftentimes this isn’t the case. Even if they don’t realize what they’re doing, these folks are making the right choices to increase engagement on social media.
Number three is to create content that increases engagement and drives sales. It’s important to consider how you're going to be talking to your community, how you plan to engage them with content that they're interested in, and how to get them to like and share your content with others. The fourth and final fundamental element of social media is to gain a following and expand your reach. These last two go hand-in-hand so we’ll discuss them in more detail later on.
Determine the Right Social Media Platform
There could be a variety of platforms that work for you; oftentimes, people use more than one platform. When thinking about which platforms to focus on, you want to be sure that the platforms you’re using allow you to showcase your strengths. For example, let’s say you’re a comedic writer. You might think that Twitter would be the best platform, and you’re absolutely right. However, you could also consider making a TikTok account to make videos of your written content to share on that platform as well.
Number two is to reach your target audience, so you want to consider who you want to reach and what is the best way to do so. The last thing is to cross-post to other platforms. Like we mentioned before, you can start with Twitter and then move on to TikTok if that makes the most sense for the content you’re sharing.
Showcase Your Strengths
To dig a little deeper, there are some helpful questions you can ask yourself to help you nail down how to showcase your strengths:
- What do I do best?
- What unique knowledge, talent, or resources do I have? Do you know somebody that could help you with your storytelling? If you have an adorable pet, that’s something that is also a resource.
- What advantages do I have?
- What do other people say I do well? It is important to spend time asking people what comes to mind when they think of you. It can be a little unnerving at first, but it’s often interesting and insightful since these are things you may not think of yourself.
- What resources do I have available? Be sure to think about how you can consistently and successfully create quality content.
- What is my greatest achievement? Make a list of the achievements that you've had in your life. This can help you understand what strengths you would like to showcase. Some people have multiple strengths and connect them. For example, your strengths might be both telling stories and applying makeup. You could combine the two by sharing your stories while doing your makeup.
Reach Your Target Audience
Once you have your strengths nailed down, it’s time to figure out who your content is for. You can start by using existing information that you already have. If you own a business, you can think of people who already frequently shop at your business and who you might like to shop there.
Additionally, it’s important to do some social listening. This can be done both on social media and in real life. For example, let’s say you own a potato chip company and you’re thinking about starting a social media presence. To learn more about your target audience, you could go to a grocery store where your chips are being sold and ask people questions about what they thought of the chips, why they are choosing the chips, and what makes those chips special to them? You can also check social media to see what people are saying about your chips online. Is the feedback positive or negative? What conversations are people having?
As an individual, social listening is a little different so you’ll want to talk to your friends and family. But as a business, you already have an established audience. By doing social listening, you can take things to the next level.
Even if you’re an individual content creator, it’s absolutely essential to research your competition. There are a lot of great ideas out there. Ultimately, if someone is already doing well with your same idea, it might not be that advantageous to try it for yourself. But there are other ideas that either nobody is doing it or it isn’t being done well. Maybe you can use your added resources to make it more interesting and more compelling.
It can be tricky to research, but it’s important to understand what kind of content your audience wants. If you’re familiar with research, using qualitative research or having individual interviews with people is an advantageous way to gain solid insight into who they are as people and what interests them. This process will give you a bit more insight into what they want to see. This kind of psychographic research (the study of consumers based on their activities, interests, and opinions) can help you build confidence that what you’re posting will do well.
For example, my personal social media accounts have mainly shown me roller skating for the last three years. I was thinking of transitioning over to something else because I wasn’t skating as much, but when I tried, the traffic just wasn’t there. Then, I posted a simple selfie while I was having fun at the skate park. The engagement that I had for just that one photo was a clear sign that my audience wants skating, which is totally fine. That's what my audience wants, so that's what they're going to get. They don't want the other things that I was experimenting with because it's just not what they want to see. And that's okay! As long as you’re creating content that your audience wants, they will engage.
Cross-post to Other Platforms
It’s important to focus on more than one platform without overwhelming yourself. Cross-posting is fantastic because there are several platforms that allow you to take something that you post and immediately share it somewhere else. For example, cross-posting is easy with Instagram and Facebook because they’re both under the Meta brand. Sharing content across Twitter and Instagram is fairly easy as well, so I would suggest starting with whatever platform you feel most comfortable with and then learning what other platforms work best for cross-posting.
For example, I am most comfortable working with Instagram, where I can cross-post very efficiently to Facebook and Twitter. However, TikTok would also work well with the content that I'm producing. I'm sure that most of you have seen videos that were initially posted on TikTok and then cross-posted to Instagram. This is usually indicated by the TikTok watermark on the video.
Another thing that I strongly suggest considering is researching things that reflect what you plan on posting. Even if you are an individual or you just plan on posting about your pets, you can find brands that post similar content and learn from their strategies. For instance, the NHL’s social media accounts are interesting because, not only do they focus on the players playing hockey, they take it a step further and share the players’ lives with their families. This approach isn’t something you’re likely to see with other professional sports and it seems to really work for them.
Now that we’ve discussed some good social media, we’re going to look at some contrasting bad social media. To start, here is a quote by M.H. McKee that says, “Wisdom is knowing the right path to take. Integrity is taking it.” For this example, we’re going to look at something that Chase bank posted a while back. Unfortunately, if you Google “Chase,” this is likely to come up, which is not good for a brand’s vision. Here is what they posted:
You: Why is my balance so low?
Bank account: Make coffee at home.
Bank account: Eat the food that's already in the fridge.
Bank account: You don't need a cab. It's only three blocks.
You: I guess we'll never know.
Bank account: Seriously?
#MondayMotivation
Sometimes, things are not funny, especially when they are from places that should be promoting financial freedom. Something that you should be aware of is the voice that you’re sharing. Chase was attempting to share something witty, but frankly, it was not witty and it was not their place to share this story because it's not endearing. It would be a different scenario if it was from a different account, but because a bank should be a positive voice in this conversation, this was not an advantageous choice.
#MondayMotivation was a hashtag intended to get people motivated, not tp tear them down. Ultimately, this attempt at being witty was not a positive insight and it was challenging for their audience. It also completely went against the grain of the hashtag itself. As you can see, Chase then came back with a second tweet:
Our #MondayMotivation is to get better at #MondayMotivation tweets. Thanks for the feedback, Twitter world.
The way they responded to the situation was great. If you are a brand or just a person on social media, you might experience something like this as well. But what we often see when a brand makes a mistake is it will just be radio silence and nothing will be said. This will just keep the fire burning on social media. It’s important to assess what was done and be honest about making a mistake. Being genuine in your apology is key because genuine interactions is what social media is ultimately about.
These days, your audience is a lot more intelligent than you could ever imagine. There’s no hiding behind closed doors; you have to be your authentic self. Companies are run by humans, and humans make mistakes. The key is to own up to them and understand what your faults are before you continue. Chase dealt with this situation very well, but they could have been a little more connected with their audience. It seems like they were still trying to be witty when it might have been good to take this more seriously. Just like any other interaction, you want to find a balance between being funny and being genuine.
Develop a Successful Social Media Strategy
Any successful social media strategy is made up of three parts: determining your brand’s voice (Who are you?), determining your brand’s mission (What are you?), and research trends and brand analytics (Why are you?).
Determine Brand’s Voice
There are some questions you can ask yourself to help figure this piece out.
- What are three words that represent your brand? If we circle back to our “comedic writer” example, they might choose witty, laid-back, and unique. They would want to consistently embody these three words in their social media presence. For example, if their brand is to be unique and they suddenly start posting more everyday content, that probably wouldn’t work well for them.
- What are the do’s and don’ts of those words? What do they mean, what don’t they mean, and what should you do?
- How can you apply those words in social media? These words can be applied by allowing them to embed your online persona. There are a lot of different brands that have very clear personas on social media.
A great place to look for those personifications of brands is in the comments of Twitter and TikTok. A lot of bigger brands have a very clear understanding of their online personas, so you can look for examples of this even if you’re just one person. One really great example of this is Planned Parenthood, whose brand personification is a “cool aunt.” They communicate this persona through visuals and the way they interact with others online. Burger King is another example. Their persona is more comedic and witty.
Determine Brand’s Mission
When thinking about your brand’s mission, you also want to research the missions of your competitors. You can also look at some businesses that aren't direct competitors to see what they're doing really well and see where they can improve. You want to get an understanding of how you can position yourself in the market. This is called market positioning, where you want to position yourself in a certain ranking in someone's mind. This is another instance where qualitative research might be advantageous. If you sell toilet paper, for example, you can interview people to ask them the first toilet paper brand that comes to mind. This will give you a stronger insight into what they're thinking.
You can easily do a lot of competitor research online. It’s a good idea to start with their social media presence to see how they're engaging with their audience. Read the comments where they're talking to their community one-on-one as well. That can show you both who they are as a brand and what is needed in that space so you know who you can be.
Next, consider your short- and long-term goals. Let’s say you just started a YouTube channel and you have ten followers. You might say that your short-term goal is to get to a thousand followers. Since gaining a thousand followers can take months, possibly years, this might be a better long-term goal for someone who is just starting out. That might be different for somebody who has a larger, more established audience base since those numbers come in a lot faster. Again, for someone that's starting out, you want to think a little bit shorter term.
Short-term goals should be things that you can accomplish in a week. When you're starting out on a platform, something that would be a good short-term goal is to determine your posting schedule. Another good short-term goal might be to get two comments on something. When you're first starting out, starting off small is going to be advantageous.
A lot of folks go wrong by thinking that those larger goals can be accomplished in a short period of time. Things like comments, likes, and shares are in your audience’s control. For short-term goals, it's a good idea to focus on those that are in your control. Long-term goals can be whatever you’d like.
Research Trends & Analytics
There are a few questions to ask to help you start thinking about how to conduct research and which trends to pay attention to:
- What’s trending on your chosen platform?
- What’s trending in your industry?
- What keywords is your target audience searching for?
- What content is your target audience engaging with?
We’ve mentioned some of these ideas before, but now we’re going to talk about how to actually do this type of research on social media. A lot of times, this information is literally at your fingertips. Hashtags are a great place to start.
For example, on Instagram, you can search for the hashtag #SkateAllDay. When you click on that hashtag, it will show you the top posts, the most recent posts, how many people have used the hashtag, and plenty of other details. Perhaps you find a post that you really like with that hashtag, so from there, you can check out what other hashtags that person used.
Hashtags are a really great place to do research when it comes to what's trending in your industry and on your chosen platform. It depends on what social media platform you're using. If you’re primarily using YouTube, for example, you can go to Google Trends to see what's trending there.
Trends on Google are oftentimes reflected on Instagram and Twitter, although to a lesser extent; Google Trends works best with YouTube. If you want to see trending hashtags on Twitter, just go directly to Twitter because trends seem to change hourly on Twitter. It’s more advantageous to go directly to the source in that circumstance. It’s the same with Tik Tok, but the difference here is that you can also research trending sounds on TikTok, which is one of the things that makes that particular platform unique.
What content is your target audience engaging with? In a lot of cases, finding this information is pretty doable. It might feel a little weird to dive deeply into these things, but the content is available for you. Once you have that information, you can make more insightful and thoughtful decisions about what you're doing.
Let's say you're a furniture company and you want to see who else your target audience is following. Are they following any other furniture brands? What other things are they into? Maybe they also follow different places that have vintage furniture, so maybe that's something that your audience enjoys. These things can be found by searching different followers’ profiles. It’s also important to see who competitors are following. Again, all that information is again at your fingertips.
In terms of keywords that your target audience is searching for, I would suggest looking into some third-party outlets for additional information. If you've noticed an underlying theme of the information I'm sharing with you, research is going to be one of the more advantageous things to be doing when it comes to improving your social media reach. The more you know, the better you can hone in on what you’re trying to showcase. There are some wonderful third-party platforms out there that can help with this kind of research. You just have to search online for them.
Now, we’re going to circle back to determining your brand’s voice, and I have some examples from McDonald’s and Wendy’s for you. First, we have a post from McDonald’s that says, “We've announced that by mid-2018 all quarter pounder burgers at the majority of our restaurants will be cooked with fresh beef.” Then Wendy’s says, “@McDonalds, So you'll still use frozen beef in MOST of your burgers in ALL of your restaurants? Asking for a friend.” You can see their voice is very witty. Here’s a different example. A tweet from McDonald’s says, “Black Friday **** Need copy and link***” and, in one of the best replies ever, Wendy’s says, “When the tweets are as broken as the ice cream machine.”
Fun fact: If you're wondering why those ice cream machines are broken all the time, it’s because they're produced by an outsourced company, not McDonald's. That company owns the right to fix those ice cream machines. So none of the employees have ever learned how to fix those machines because that outside company won't let them.
As you can see from these tweets, Wendy's has a very clear, witty, smart way of coming back at McDonald's. Their personality is really shining through, whereas social media is definitely not McDonald's strength as a brand, but they do a lot of other things really well. At least, they were struggling in 2017, but that was five years ago, so maybe things have improved.
Here is another helpful quote from Mike DiLorenzo: Social networks aren't about websites. They're about experiences.” This is something that I want you to consider going into the next step once you understand your brand’s voice and your brand’s mission. You want to understand what experience you want your audience to have. We’re going to look at some of Burger King’s social media because, overall, they do a really amazing job with their branding on social media.
We’re going to look at this first example to learn more about content and whether or not it's engaging. Visually speaking, they're very consistent and they have a very solid color palette on Instagram. However, the copy isn't really singing and it's very flat. The picture says, “It's all about the Ch’King.” The caption below says, “All the other chicken sandwiches wish they were the Ch’King. Make a meal out of it—get a free whopper when you buy the Ch’King on the BK app.”
People might be excited about the deal, but the post itself wasn't really that interesting.” One of the comments on the post even says, “Y'all replaced the best thing on the menu. Bring back the other one, please. It was the only joy I had left.” If this was truly an engaging post, you wouldn't see people leaving such off-topic comments. If the post had truly been emotionally impactful, then the comments would have reflected that impact.
Create Engaging Content
When thinking about how to make your content engaging, there are a few things you’ll want to consider:
- More storytelling, less static. If your post just mentions the 50% off sale or something like that, it’s clear that you’re just trying to sell something. It’s very flat and uninteresting, so you want to avoid that as much as possible. You can tell a story to get somebody to go to your sale, and that's going to be a lot more engaging. This is especially important if you’re doing a paid advertisement because they usually contain buttons that say things like “Buy now!” or “Learn more!” You don't need your copy to say that same thing. Instead, you want your copy to tell a story and you want your images to tell a story. To help you, think about the stories that your family and friends have told you to understand what you find compelling and engaging.
- Be consistent. This is very important and we’ll talk about that in more detail shortly.
- Quality content.
Storytelling vs. Static
When thinking of this concept, there are a few ideas to keep in mind:
- Basic sales tactics are boring and not empathetic
- Make your stories personable
- Make your stories captivating
- Make your stories reach your audience emotionally
To help with this, maybe rewind a little bit and think about when you were little and people were sharing stories with you. What were some stories that really stuck with you? My grandfather shared a lot of hilarious stories about growing up in rural Minnesota. All of those stories are deeply embedded in my head because they were so emotionally engaging; they made us laugh and cry. These are things that you want to think about when you're telling a story online. You can tell that same story with a photo. You can tell that story with just a couple of words. You can tell that story with a video, but you really want to make it emotionally personable.
Be Consistent
This is one of the most important things you can do. If all else fails, just post consistently. Have a schedule and post a specific amount of times per week or per day. If you abide by that, you will reach a wider audience. Whether your audience grows quickly or slowly depends on the content itself, but if you can be consistent, that will definitely grow your audience. On the other hand, if you have all of the other elements nailed down but you don’t post consistently, it’s not going to work in your favor. Consistency is an essential aspect of success on social media platforms.
Depending on what platform you choose to use, there are some additional things that you want to consider. The first is how frequently should you post on your platform? Depending on your platform, that's going to change. I recommend experimenting with this to see what gets more engagement. For example, on Instagram, you could post anywhere from one to five times a day. You have to see what works best for you. Is posting five times a day something that everybody can do? Maybe not, so be sure your goals are realistic within your schedule. You can always increase it as you become more comfortable, but sticking to your schedule is ultimately the most important thing.
Knowing when your audience is present is very important, too. If you have a business account, most social media platforms will give you some insight into your audience. For example, Instagram will literally tell you all the active times of your audience. Oddly enough, my audience is the most active at 3:00 pm. It may sound strange, but that's when they're most active. This means that I should ideally be posting at 3:00 pm. This is not realistic for my schedule.
When I was posting regularly, I usually posted in the morning because I could fit into my schedule before I went to work. Did it work best for my audience? No, but it was also not my full-time job. You have to assess what is going to work for your schedule and find a balance when building your brand.
It’s also important to try and respond to comments as quickly as possible and be active when responding. This may sound fast, but ideally, you want to be within a 15-minute mark of each comment if you want to start engaging your audience. This does depend on where your audience is right now. If you already have a large audience, this doesn't pertain as much to you. This is something that folks with a smaller audience definitely want to consider.
Quality Content
We’ve already discussed the importance of posting engaging, but it’s also important to post high-quality graphics, video, and photography. Although this is a very important factor, there are things that take precedence over posting high-quality content. Ideally, you want to have your storytelling and frequency in a solid place before you want to invest more in this aspect.
A lot of mobile devices are able to capture high-quality content, but if you’re concerned that the content that you're posting isn't of high quality because, for example, you don't have access to a videographer or a photographer to help you out, that's fine. Figure out a way to communicate with your audience in a more organic way.
For example, perhaps you don't create posts on Instagram very often but you're active multiple times a day in your stories. That's still engaging your audience because they can DM you and respond directly about whatever you're posting in your stories. That won't necessarily work for everyone, but it is definitely something to consider.
On average, the content that you see in a story is going to be of lesser quality than, in general, what you would see on the actual feed of Instagram or your FYP on TikTok. TikTok is actually another great example of this. The actual posts are very important, but once you reach 1,000 followers, you’re able to go live. Going live is lesser in quality, but it’s more about engagement with your audience and interacting with them.
You want to avoid posting static, low-quality content. But if having some low-quality content is unavoidable, you can consider other options like going live or taking advantage of stories. What I mean by static is really dull or uninteresting content. For example, the chicken sandwich I showed you earlier is considered static. They tried to make this static image slightly interesting with the caption, but I would still consider it static.
On the other hand, I would consider this image to be storytelling. If you look at the lettuce, it has a little swoop on one side and that’s what they’re referring to as the “emo phase.” This was a series of three or four images that were all different hairstyles, which is why the caption is, “working on that summer lookbook.” This is a lot more engaging and it’s telling a story. Copy-wise, it’s very simple. Things don’t have to be complex to tell a story because your audience is going to make up the story for themselves. Giving somebody a stepping stone to think of their own stories can also be considered storytelling.
This Maya Angelou quote is incredible. If you don't know who she is, she's an American poet and a civil rights activist. If you grew up in a similar way to me, you probably saw her on Sesame Street. Anyway, this is one of her quotes that is very powerful and I think about it a lot when it comes to your presence on social media.
The quote is, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” What do people feel when they think about you? It might sound like a crazy question, but truly, you want to make people feel something. That's why storytelling is so important on social media. The proof is in the interactions. Here, we have a static image on the left with 5000 likes, but we have over double the amount of likes from the static option.
Gain A Following and Expand Your Reach
Quality Over Quantity
With this idea, quality over quantity is the key. Engage your audience and post frequently and consistently. Earlier, I did say that some quality can be sacrificed depending on what platform you're using. What I mean by that is that it’s important to post quality storytelling and engaging content; visual quality is slightly separate from these two things.
Quality content will make your brand more trustworthy, compelling, and empathetic towards your target audience. I'm not talking about the quality of the photo or video that you're posting. I'm talking about the quality of emotional content that you're showcasing. This is something that will ebb and flow as you go on.
Sometimes things won't necessarily have that emotional connection, but ideally, you’re posting content that is emotionally engaging. This is basically what makes a brand more human, which therefore makes them more trustworthy and compelling overall. So you really want to embed yourself with those humanistic feelings as you're using social media.
Engage Your Audience
It’s very important that you respond to your audience in your voice. This is one reason I suggested looking at your competitors. Look at what they post, but also look at how they are replying to comments as well. That's going to give you a really strong insight of what their personality is. Maybe they're posting some really witty stuff, but when you look at their comment section, you realize that their responses aren’t as good. This can absolutely happen, and it’s something that you want to be consistent with. You want that voice when you're making comments to be consistent with the voice you post content with because that is going to gain the trustworthiness of your brand. You want to avoid shallow, empty responses.
Think of things that are a bit more engaging. Asking questions with your posts is a huge thing you can do. Oftentimes when I post, I’ll add in a question to get my audience engaged. Things like, “What are they up to?” “What did they do during their holiday break?” There are a lot of different things that you could ask to get them engaged. Simply asking questions on social media is advantageous. Commenters that are comfortable with commenting will likely respond to a question.
Post Frequently and Consistently
There's a lot of room for experimentation here because it depends on when your audience is most active. Generally speaking, you want to post at least weekly on YouTube or a blog. These are long-form platforms. Most of the content that people watch on YouTube is longer than 10 minutes. There was a time when YouTube had a lot more short content, but that was before things like Vine or TikTok existed. Once those came into play, then that shorter content on YouTube disappeared. Longer content takes a longer time to produce, so if you can do more than weekly, that's fantastic.
You’ll want to post at least daily on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. The hardest one here is TikTok because now, you can post up to three-minute-long videos. Creating a compelling, engaging story that lasts three minutes is much more challenging than it sounds. Doing that on a daily basis is asking a lot of some folks.
If you want a perfect example of how to use TikTok on a daily basis, look up Noodle the dog. If you don’t know who Noodle is, he’s an amazing, 14-year-old pug who doesn't want to get up in the morning sometimes. His owner will gently lift him up and if he doesn't want to do anything, he goes completely limp. His owner started calling it “Bones or No Bones Day.” If you've ever heard this saying, it's from Noodle the Pug on TikTok.
The reason why Noodle became such a success is because every single day there's Noodle. We all wanted to see whether Noodle is going to have a Bones or a No Bones Day. It was simple enough that the owner could be consistent about posting while having a full-time job. That is incredible work. Simple, compelling, and consistent. It hit on all three and it went viral.
If you’re posting on Instagram, you want to post at least daily. When it comes to stories, you should post three to five times a day. Social media is a lot of work! That's why you want to focus on platforms that you feel most comfortable with first, then slowly branch from there. You don't want to spread yourself too thin; be realistic. Post at least daily on Facebook as well, and post at least three times daily on stories and Snapchat. I've seen Snapchat work really successfully for businesses.
I have a Snapchat, but I don't ever use it. Because of the incorporation of stories on Instagram, the necessity of that app isn't there for me personally. Other businesses have definitely taken advantage of that app and it does work for some folks. If that's your platform of choice, make sure that you're posting at least three times a day. If you're using Instagram or Facebook, you should be doing your stories at least three times a day.
I think one of the hardest things to grasp in this presentation is the concept of telling a story and what it means to tell a story. I’m going to show you this commercial for Google that I think does a really great job of storytelling and getting that emotional connection. I'm sorry in advance if it's a little too emotional, I definitely prefer advertisements that have that really strong emotional grab. I think this is a pristine example of storytelling.
The reason why I show this commercial and not something from someone like Dude Perfect is because I want to showcase that brands can have a personality and display emotions too. It is not exclusive to a person being themselves on social media; brands and companies can have that emotional value as well. Hopefully, that makes a little bit more sense.
In Summary
Here is a quick summary of what we’ve covered today. This is a lot of stuff to think about.
- Determine the right social media platform for your goals. This includes showcasing your strengths, reaching your target audience, and cross-posting to other platforms.
- Develop a successful social media strategy. This includes determining your brand’s vision, determining your brand’s mission, and researching trends and brand analytics. Remember that most of those things are accessible through these social media platforms. Social listening is another way to get more information about what people want.
- Create content that increases engagement and drives sales. This includes more storytelling and less static. The example I just showed is a good example of an emotional story. In my opinion, this is much more challenging for a brand than it is for an individual. It’s also important to be consistent with what you are posting. If you can stick to a consistent schedule, you will gain a larger audience. Be consistent and persistent. Consider the quality of your content as well. If the quality isn't going to be quite there, consider different places that don't need high quality as much, like lives and stories.
- Gain a following and expand your reach. Remember the quality over quantity rule and make sure you’re abiding by your schedule. Engage your audience and post frequently. Again, persistent and consistent!
Before we end things here, I've got these links that I definitely want you to check out so that you can learn more about who we are and how we can help you achieve your social media goals. We have both a Social Media Marketing Certificate and Social Media Marketing classes. If there is a particular platform that you want to focus on, you can go to one individual class, or you could do the whole social media marketing certificate as well. I hope all of you had a delightful time during the presentation this evening.
We do have a question in the chat about promotional services. I think using a company that knows what they’re doing to help get your company can absolutely be advantageous. If you’re
trying to increase followers organically through a notable and trustworthy company and they are able to create the content for you? Yes. Paying for followers and paying for likes? No. It's not organic. It's not real, and it's not going to help your business.
Those are all the questions we have, so I hope everyone had a great time. Until next time!
