A Guide to Barebones Social Media
I hate social media. I’m not joking. I hate it.
Twitter is a swirling maelstrom of noise and rage and, as for the others, they’re designed to manipulate us. For this reason, I resent every income-producing hour stolen from me by Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and, to an extent, LinkedIn (I've only dipped my toes into Threads, almost entirely because I dislike Elon Musk and I consider Threads an act of rebellion). Yet I’m a realist, so I also accept that social media is a necessary?evil.
I can hear what you’re thinking, though. If you follow me on social media, you’re thinking, “Rubbish, man. No one who posts that often hates it that much!” And, yet, I do. But I have secrets. You can have them, too. Right?now.
Here are my 5 secrets to barebones social?media:
#1. Be selective about platform choice
You don’t have to be everywhere. It’s not an all-or-nothing game. It’s a “fish where the fish are” game. Like dating. To get the right attention from people who will actually give you work, you must be where they are and focus all your efforts?there.
Decide where your most desirable audience spends the most time, and invest there. Only there. At least, to start?with.
For example
#2. Be deliberate about your themes &?topics
Define your objectives. Based on who your fish are, what do you want to get out of your investment of intellectual and emotional bandwidth? Do you want your audience to know that you’re a specialist in generative artificial intelligence (GAI)? That you’re an expert when it comes to building sales funnels for online courses? Or that your ESG knowledge — and ability to implement this for multinational corporations — is?next-level?
If so, whichever-it-is would be your primary theme and you’d create and share content about and around this area, to seize interest from the right fish. Going one or two levels deeper, you’d also define specific topics that you could cover to win and keep?interest.
For example
Let’s say you’re the AI specialist. Your objective is to get paid to teach in-house comms and marketing teams to leverage generative AI. Your primary theme, for now at least, is De-Mystifying Generative AI. Your content should be tutorial in nature: how tos, listicles, hot tips, hacks?etc.
#3. Pre-schedule the vast majority of your?posts
If you don’t derive joy (thanks, Marie Kondo) from social media, you’re going to want to give it as little of your available resources as you can. But, bearing in mind what a time-suck social media can be, you’re going to need a?system.
For example
My system is Sunday afternoons. Yup, that’s it. A weekly slice of life dedicated to two hours of thinking, writing, and pre-scheduling, so I don’t have to go onto social media much during the week. There are, of course, parameters, which mean that I can spend the bulk of the week doing my actual work without thinking too hard about my social media?obligations:
Find your ideal slot or slots, select your tools of choice and then book the time in. Commit to it. Make it?sacred.
#4. Curate other thinkers’ good?stuff
Here’s the thing: at least one out of every four posts I publish is not my original thinking. I curate content from other smart?people.
Content curation is more than resharing other people’s content. It’s about selecting the best or most thought-provoking content to share, in line with your strategy, and giving your original take on it. Sharing solid stuff from big thinkers reflects well on you by association but it also helps to balance your narrative. This is because it introduces valuable information, insights and IP from within and around your?industry.
There are options when curating: You might elevate a piece of content you agree with (or disagree with) — or you might go a bit further and aggregate it, distil it, or mash it up. Whatever you do, try to put almost as much thought into aligning with your audience as you do when creating content from scratch. And, of course, credit and link to the appropriate?source.
#5. Persist — especially once it’s not fun?anymore
There will come a time when you’ve done what I’m suggesting, you’ve seen some momentum and you’re feeling good about your investment in social media. Then either circumstances or internal demons will knock you off-course — and you’ll start to lose your?mojo.
In your head, this may sound?like:
If you’re serious about social media self-promotion,?don’t?allow yourself to lose your way.?Don’t?stop when it becomes a pain in the ass, because that’s usually the tipping point. Go quite a bit further than your comfort?zone.
Not cannibalism but consistency
In 1997, with 40 seconds left in the third round of a heavyweight boxing match, Mike Tyson marked 13 years of vicious competition by biting a chunk out of Evander Holyfield’s right ear. To add gore to injury, he then spat the chunk onto the?canvas.
You know the?story.
Yet did you know that, after a doctor examined Holyfield, the two continued boxing? Yup, Tyson got a two-point deduction and a warning. Still, he bit Holyfield again. Almost as soon as the bout resumed, he went for Holyfield’s?left?ear.
What’s the moral of the story? That the left ear tastes nicer than the right? Nope. The moral is: Keep going. Less Tyson, more Holyfield. When they go low, you go high, but you still go, and go, and go. Because social media can work a lot harder for you than it does today, provided that you do the minimum you can tolerate, consistently, over?time.
This column was originally published on MarkLives.com.