The 10 social media commandments

Everyone knows the Ten Commandments. This story, engrained into society, is the cornerstone for multiple monotheistic religions and serves as a code of rules.

These commandments continue to serve as a guideline for how to live and a reference for spiritual awareness.

But you can apply this comparison for more worldly purposes as well, like social media. For your overall strategy, boil down the innate rules of social media into a set of 10 focus points.

Following this 10-item system will increase your followers and generate more engagement on your accounts.

Adhere to these commandments for social media success.

Commandment 1: You shall produce content only for your audience

If you read only one commandment, make it this one.

Those getting the most out of social media understand and value what their audience wants to see.

Not what you want your audience to see.

Not what you think your audience wants to see.

You’ll need to have an intuitive feel for what makes your audience tick and provide content of value for them.

If you want to use social media to make a sales pitch, you must offer something your audience will want, need, or go crazy over. Before you do this, you’ll need to have a clear feel for who your audience is.

This lack of defined audience discernment is why you should use social media primarily to focus on building brand awareness. An awareness campaign works on social media for two reasons.

First, it establishes brand loyalty. You want to provide content that informs or entertains with no strings attached—or no obligation of a tradeoff.?

Second, once you build a solid base, your account analytics can tell you who is looking at your content and provide insights on what this type of person likes (see Commandment 10).

Making content for your audience then becomes easier. You know what your audience enjoys and what kinds of content work for that particular social media platform.

Commandment 2: You shall tailor your content to what the social platform does well

Every social network has its advantages and disadvantages. The more you learn these attributes, the easier it will be to tell if that network is right for your needs.

Their structures are a saving grace for you. You don’t need to be on all the social networking sites.

If you are a storefront business, it doesn’t make sense to be on a B2B, professionals-based social network like LinkedIn. Likewise, if your ideal customers are 55 and older, there’s little reason to branch out into TikTok.

By following Commandment 1 and knowing who your audience is, you can have anchor accounts on the networks that make sense to you. Branch out if you wish, but that’s only if you want to explore and have fun.

But this isn’t an excuse to eliminate certain types of content—far from it. You will need to emphasize the content that works best for that particular platform.

Remember, people want a path to least resistance. Using a poorly sized picture or a video that links to a site rather than playing right on the post are things you need to think about ahead of time.

If your content looks out of place, that’s not the platform’s fault—you will need to ensure it works before posting or fix your content if it’s not working as it should.?

It’s imperative to understand the rules for that particular network and follow them. If not, even your best content will not perform as you expect.

Commandment 3: You shall not disregard the algorithm

Our earlier blog post touched on this. You can’t post willy nilly and expect to become social media famous. You must have a clear understanding of your chosen platform’s algorithm.

A social platform’s algorithm is the code running in the background. It ensures the user sees the type of content they want to receive based on their interests and past behaviors.

As such, this is the closest thing your chosen platform has to a creator’s set of rules. It sorts out content to determine which account a user sees first. It can also bury your content so that few users see it at all.

If you’re wondering why your content isn’t getting noticed, you probably ran afoul of the algorithm.

There could be many issues holding your content back. It could be you’re posting too infrequently. It could be your type of content is not formatted correctly. It could be you’re posting at times when your audience is inactive.

But you don’t need to know everything about how the algorithm works. People have already looked into this for you. All you need to do is go on Google to learn the basics of how your platform works and embrace experimentation.

If a post a week isn’t moving the needle, try posting every few days. If you’re posting in the afternoon, try to figure out how to submit your next post in the morning. If you don’t have content, find great stuff from someone else’s account and post that.

The key is that the algorithm recognizes you as an authority through producing valuable content consistently.

Commandment 4: Keep a consistent schedule

Post consistently.

This commandment is the best counterpart to help stay on track with Commandment 3.

Each social media algorithm has an optimal number of posts it expects an account to make per week. To someone who doesn’t see the value of social media, the number of these posts can seem excessive.

Seriously. Twitter recommends you post a tweet 15 times per day!

While 15 tweets a day might seem like a lot to you, try to reach a happy medium. If you only tweet once and a while, would you consider upping that tweet by once per day? If you tweet once per day, why not consider tweeting twice a day or once at 2 p.m. every day.

Consistency can form habits. Posting on social media at reliable intervals removes your barriers to resistance. It also trains your audience to expect content from you at a predictable period.

Repackaging your existing content is an easy way to increase posting frequency. You can easily take existing blog posts and list the main points in an infographic or a short video summary.

Commandment 5: Honor video content

When thinking about content, visuals are critical, and some types of visuals are better than others.

You should at least think about incorporating video into your production for a few reasons.

First, for business purposes, social networks are trying to copy TikTok. There has been an influx of new features trying to mimic TikTok’s short-video format. The Head of Instagram even said?the platform is going to begin prioritizing video content over photos.

If that’s not enough to convince you, how about behavioral science?

Human beings learn more from pictures than we do from text.

According to Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience, which tracks how various media aids memory function, we remember only 10 percent of the information we read (that’s not good for this blog post!). We remember 30 percent of what we see, so images are still 2x more effective than text alone.

But we remember a whopping 50 percent through the combination of what we see and hear in videos.

Video content might be the hardest to produce. But it should at least be on the table as videos will be most helpful in achieving your social media goals.

Commandment 6: You shall have defined goals

Grasping your audience, your platform, and your content is what everyone should do on social. But knowing what social media should accomplish is unique to the individual.?

New World Media Management and I ask every new client to identify which marketing goal is most important. It’s pivotal because different objectives need specific strategies.

This exercise is important. Different goals require a different set of strategies and procedures. What works for one might not work for the other.

For example, a direct sales strategy requires a set of consumers who knows what they want. Content for this purpose will not appeal to the majority of the users who follow your social media account.

On the other hand, building awareness is a broader approach. This strategy requires making sure the best content reaches a larger number of people.?

Many people follow Wendy’s or MoonPie’s Twitter accounts who would never buy their food. But these two brands have developed such a unique, entertaining voice that they’ve become must follows.?

Once you know what you want to do, the road ahead becomes easier. You can then implement set strategies for success. Again, what works for one particular type of goal is different from another type.

If you don’t plan, you’re more likely to reach an unintended outcome and be forced to start over.

Commandment 7: You shall not fly by the seat of your pants

Social media is both an instant and fleeting form of information. Every social post has a half-life point when it diminishes in value.

This passing quality is a paradox because even though the value of a post is highest when it’s first published, you can plan and write most posts ahead of time. All it takes is a calendar and a shift in mindset.

Professional social media managers plan out their posts based on an editorial calendar. An editorial calendar is a method to synthesize company news and events while planning posts around these activities.

You can use an editorial calendar to ramp up for holidays, time new product releases, or automate posts to free up your schedule.

On the planning side, author and marketer Pamela Wilson suggests preparing a high-value offer every month and using your editorial calendar to promote that offer over multiple days. This tactic provides value by giving your audience a snippet of your offer, spreading awareness of it, and promoting something of high value to you.

On the productivity side, entrepreneur and lifestyle personality Tim Ferriss says one of the biggest efficiency hacks is batching, allocating your time to performing multiple versions of the same task in one sitting. By doing this, you eliminate the costs of time setting up, multitasking, and procrastination.

But keep in mind while most people think solely about content creation, you can make tremendous gains just by showing up and interacting with your audience.

Commandment 8: You shall not ignore your audience

Social media is a two-way street. It’s not enough to post content only. You must engage with other accounts and respond to users who interact with you.

The best way to grow your account organically is to engage with similar users who don’t already follow your page. You can answer questions, provide positive feedback, or just become a part of the conversation.

Social media is one big party. No one remembers the people sitting in the corner.

It’s incumbent on you to join that party. Find the other social media accounts in your niche and make your presence known. Comment, tag, and follow others in that sphere. Show you care and you are human.

Being passive can also become a liability. Users expect more from the brands they follow on social media than ever.

Your success on social media is also determined by how you engage with your followers. According to a Sprout Social study, 40 percent of consumers expect brands to respond within the first hour of reaching out on social media, while 79 percent expect a response in the first 24 hours.

Most comments for small- and mid-sized accounts warrant a reply. Take all negative concerns to direct message for one-on-one resolution as soon as possible.

Engaging is the easiest way to show your authenticity and build brand loyalty. Ignoring this commandment will make it impossible to foster an organic following.

Commandment 9: You shall not dismiss a paid media strategy

This next commandment is a check on your humility.

No one wants to be the person who pays a social media company for ads or boosted posts. First, how embarrassing is it that you’re paying a social conglomerate for a supposedly free service. Second, you don’t want to be known as the account that got where it was through the 21st century equivalent of payola.

If you can put this pride aside, paying for your account’s preferential treatment is a tremendous advantage.

First, it might be the only way to gain any organic traction on some types of platforms. Facebook has notably throttled down its organic engagement. If you are starting out on this network, growing a following is next to impossible without an extensive contact list or offline branding.

Second, you wouldn’t be alone. Paid content on social media has exploded. Social media is the second biggest market within digital advertising after Google. Social ad revenue is expected to grow to $138.4 billion by 2025.

After you pay a social media platform, you’ll get some juice. Through paid social, you can increase the impressions for a post, ask users to follow your account, or even use retargeted ads to touch users who just visited your website.

And third, who cares if the naysayers have a problem. While they are trying to get a following the authentic way, you have already bootstrapped your strategy. You can focus on achieving your goals through targeted ads. You can also use the metrics from those ads to provide further insight to see if you’re on the right track.

Commandment 10: You shall not ignore data

The old saying goes, “If you can measure it, you can manage it.”

If you have a particular goal, you can read data to determine if you’re on the right path to meeting it.

Tap into the analytics software of your social platform or use third-party software.

Take the time every week or month to see your most popular posts. If you know which posts receive the most likes, comments, and shares, you can determine which types of content and subjects your audience finds compelling.

Analyzing data also works the other way. If you do not see the results you want, you will need to rethink your content. Reviewing the commandments above can help. Are you following the rules the commandments suggest? If not, you might need to change your social approach.

You can then plan to produce more of this content as you review your editorial calendar every month or every quarter.

Fear no evil

These are the 10 social media commandments. Keep them, and you will build a following and receive the benefits for your time and hard work.

After I founded New World Media Management almost a decade ago, I studied and used these commandments to find social media wins for my clients on any network.

New World Media Management has the know-how to develop and execute social media strategies. We have built accounts with thousands of followers and with verifiable data to prove a superb return on investment.

If you’d like to partner with us, I’d encourage you to contact us here.

The rest is up to you. Follow the commandments above and keep the faith.

(This article is a reproduction of New World Media Management's most recent blog post. View the original here.)