It's Beautiful...but is it social?

I often hear people talking about how many times you should post to a network and how much it matters that your posts follow a brand standard, but from my experience, that advice doesn't do much of anything but add stress to the people posting.

Just this last week, I assembled a team of 38 people to cover C2 Montréal on social media and my advice to them?

"Post everything and post often!"

It helped that pretty much every member of the #C2SocialSquad had over 10 years of experience of posting to social media platforms professionally (so I could trust their judgement), but it turns out that this unfiltered view of the event was very beneficial! The audience loved it, engaged frequently (almost 35 thousand engagements with our content!!!), and generally felt 'closer' to the event because of it. I heard from several participants, who personally sought me out to comment on how much they loved the coverage, that they loved that we seemed to cover every nook and cranny of this amazing event.

Could we get away with close to 1,000 posts every day? Probably not a great idea - too much would get lost in the noise. But it worked for the event. Not not only did our engagement grow, so did our numbers...more than ever before! We saw a 5,000% increase in follows across all platforms.

This whole switch to highly curated content may look prettier, but it's a rule that suits a designer eye and doesn't take into account that your audience may actually want a more holistic portrait of your company or event. Aesthetic misses essential information. Aesthetic hides the parts of you that people can relate to. Aesthetic is safe, but not open and vulnerable.

So is aesthetic truly social? Watch this week's video (above) to see the full answer. (plus, there is a bonus from one of my amazing employees that makes me LOL every time)

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Truly Social is a web series that you can share with your boss or client when they're not really "getting" social. It's also the name of my company - where we work with clients on helping them develop their own content series.

I've been working on this social stuff for over 18 years and I've been a participant in the social web since 1992. My videos (usually) come out every SUNDAY ...with ~5 minute "lessons" on what are truly social practices (and what are NOT).