In a recent discussion with world famous Neil Patel in the Secret Academy, he shared some mind blowing predictions and patterns to look out for in 2015 when it comes to social media. One of the main things he discussed was the need for personalization in 2015 and how powerful its impact can be on your bottom line. His strategy will help many of our Secret Academy members get better results form their social media efforts. It also made me think about something we do all the time at Secret Entourage but rarely speak about.
One of the most powerful strategies we have around social media is our in-depth understanding of who is on which platform and what are they looking at and for.
One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is their misunderstanding of social as an extension of their business, or one more way to communicate their message to the same audience who visits their site or interacts with their businesses. In other words, they assume that the best way to stay top of mind is to be in front of their users via social channels.
The reality is that the users that are on your social channels are not the same people or even have the same interest, and this is the reason why you are missing out on a very large opportunity.
The biggest mistake you can make is to assume that the same user or your main audience is the one you are reaching on social, when in reality you have an important opportunity to reach a whole new audience in a new manner.
For our own brand at Secret Entourage, we use Facebook quite extensively and realized that it was a great tool for us, and we also realized that YouTube and Instagram held powerful weight.
What we learned is that we have very few users that follow us on all channels and keep up with the large amount of content we share. While we use to simply put out content and push/syndicate into various channels, we now no longer do so and instead only push out relevant content based on what we understand of our user on that specific channel.
In other words, we now understand that the demographic that follows us on Instagram is very different than the one that follows us on Facebook or Youtube. As a matter of fact they are so completely different that our data showed that none of these groups were also the main groups that followed us via organic search.
How much money are you leaving on the table?
We realized we were losing over $60,000 a month by simply pushing the same content through our various channels in the same manner. This was discovered by simply tweaking one small thing in our business and that was leveraging our staff to each handle one social media account rather than put all social under one person and one strategy.
By creating a personalized approach to each and understanding who the actual follower is on each platform, we were able to capitalize and re-enforce our social strategy going into 2015.
So what should you do right now?
– Understand your user on each platform.
Understand the demographic as well as how often and why the user is on that platform specifically. Also how much time they spend and what other interests they may have.
– Understand what they enjoy about your brand on that particular platform.
Understand if images work better or video clips get the most engagement. All you have to do is monitor how your audience interacts with your posts. Once you understand the most appropriate way to communicate with them, simply enhance it and refine the process.
– Tweak and optimize new ways to reach them to take action.
Creating your own ads are not bad, but knowing how your audience feels about them on a specific platform is even better. Test, tweak, test, repeat.
Those are some actionable tips to get you going to make sure you didn’t make the same $60,000 a month mistake we made. Even Neil Patel shares a $100,000 experiment he did on Instagram and what he learned in his episode, make sure to not miss it.
