Master These Six Underrated Skills to Elevate Your Social Media Marketing
Basic social media marketing best practices and the latest engagement hacks can easily be found online everywhere you turn. Here are six skills that you might not expect (or have heard of yet) that are guaranteed to make an impact on your social media marketing results.
Take Action from Clarity
In order to find your niche and stand out within that niche, you need to be crystal clear knowing and communicating about who you are, who you serve, how you serve them and why. Your clarity here will determine how you post, when you post, where you post, and what you post.
The Ability to Navigate Uncertainty
From algorithms to platform changes and bugs, to trolls doing what trolls do best - there is a lot out of your control on social media. In order to thrive, brands need to be willing to try new things and be OK with the fact that sometimes (OK, most of the time) plans require last minute adjustments. Smart businesses always have a plan B...and maybe even a plan C.
Analyze and Understand What Analytics Numbers Are Telling You (and What They Aren't)
High engagement doesn't always produce sales. Sales aren't always trackable. A social media account with under 1,000 followers sometimes produces more revenue than an account with over 100,000 followers. Results on social media are not linear so brands need to be able to balance their focus on hard numbers with less easily measurable KPI's such as influence, resonance, trust, etc. And when it comes to analyzing, brands need to be able to review their content and their competitors' content looking through the lens of what is or isn't helping to reach their goals and why - and then continue to optimize and evolve as needed.
The Ability to See From Your Audience's Point of View
If you can't put yourself in the shoes of your ideal audience your content won't be able to resonate with them on social media either. If you don't know what your audience likes, wants, needs, where they already are on social media or what they already consume on social media, it's your job to do the research to figure it out. Otherwise it is very unlikely your followers (even if they engage with your content) will ever convert to sales.
Constant Discernment
The ability to sift through the noise, platform changes, new features, trends, and ever-changing algorithms without getting distracted from your goals is game-changing. Those with this skill can discern correctly what will and won't work for their brand, saving tons of time and money that would otherwise be a waste of a lot of effort for little return.
Social Media Advertising
Less than 5% of followers of a brand page on Facebook will see that brand's organic content. On Instagram it can be as low as 15%. Not to mention on every platform when you post and how much engagement each posts gets shortly after the post time will also influence whether or not a post is shown to a brand's followers. If brands want to make sure their content is getting out there without spending countless hours churning out content like a machine, they need to understand how to utilize social media advertising to help meet their goals (plus, social advertising actually works really well when you know how to do it!).