Spam Less Socialize More

For a business or a public figure, social media is about increasing brand awareness and connecting with your audience. Those are your goals. Say them with me. Your tribe will follow you because of who you are and how you can add relevance to drowned out the endless string of ads on their news feed. Epic amounts of brand promotion translates to one thing. Spam. Don’t do that. Spam gets filtered, spam gets junk engagement, and spam gets put on mute. To avoid being spam-tacular lets look at why in the ever loving social strata we follow brands in the first place. 

1. Good Branding Benefits 

What does your tribe gain from adding your voice to their already jam packed newsfeed? Does connecting to your brand say something positive about them? Does it help them brand themselves? And hell, how are you spreading your message of overall awesomeness?

• Are you charming?
• Are you original?
• Are you up on all of the latest trends?
• Are you informative and quirky? 

If you’re not, each and every one of your followers should be receiving a baby unicorn in the mail the second they click like because otherwise it ain’t gonna happen. You have to give the social-verse a reason to follow you.

2. Killer Content

Before we follow an individual or a brand we want to know what to expect. We want to know what there is to look forward to and we’re going to dig for dirt. We’re going to dig through your content like a truffle pig in the forests of France. Give us a reason to keep up with you.

Ask yourself, “Self does the frequency of my posting suck? Am I posting 487,575,896,047,729 times a day, or have I gone more than a week without posting at all?” 

“Self, did the last post I made come off like a used car salesman. Was it smarmy, half-assed, or just really excruciatingly dull?”

 We, as users, want the full ass version of your social media page. We want photos and videos and unique perspectives. We want to follow pages that are active and publish unique content. So have a purpose and a perspective. Do that. 

Don’t just have a brand page ‘cause yo momma told you you needed one. Don’t even do it because I said so. Be on social media to be present in the lives of your tribe. Publish content that reflects your brand’s goals and then interact. Save the promotion for those rare occasions that you have a specific event or item that you’re promoting. If you’ve been interesting enough the rest of the time, we’ll be anxiously awaiting those nuggets and won’t just scroll on by. 

Boost Baby Boost

We’re human, it’s natural to want to be visible in the world we inhabit. As businesses, however, our survival depends on that visibility. Now secretly, or maybe not so secretly, a beast lurks in the background of your seemingly innocuous Facebook coding. It calls itself The Nothing. Meh, not really, but that would be way cooler. Maybe you’ve heard of it already…EdgeRank.

EdgeRank: (aka: The Eater of Posts) is the formula that Facebook uses to decide which posts will show up in a user’s news feed. With the decline of Facebook visibility we’ve seen our shiny happy content once shared with almost all of our followers limited to a whopping 16-17% of them. Ouch. Seriously. Marketing on Social Media has become a lot more competitive because of this.

In order to maximize your visibility, and therefore your effectiveness, you should be posting with awareness of the three factors EdgeRank takes into consideration: Affinity Score, Weight, and Time.

Your Affinity Score is set to measure how strong your relationship is with other Facebook users and page fans based on interaction. The individuals that interact with you most often are going to be the ones most likely to see you show up in their Facebook feed. That means that any adoring lurkers out there are often missing out on your awesome content. No bueno, and hey, lurkers need love too, but to benefit everyone they need to feel like, and become, part of the conversation.

Now this may not be a perfect solution to increase your visibility, but here’s an insider tip. If you hover over the “Liked” button on any page you’re a fan of, you’ll see there’s an option to get notifications from that page. Try posting an update that asks your community to do this for your page. When you get your fans engaged in this way your post visibility is definitely going to increase. I wouldn’t expect a large number of your fans to do it, but even if a small percentage with the highest affinity do, it will still boost you out there.

The Weight of interaction refers to the type of interaction you are getting. A different weight value is assigned to likes, shares, and comments. In a nut shell, shares and comments count for more in the eyes of EdgeRank to gain you more visibility. Likes are great, but to go big you need to get a good conversation going with shares to include newbies to join the par-tay. Don’t be shy to show some love by using the @ when a post is applicable to the people that will connect to them the most.

Once you get some momentum going in your conversation through your awesome content and lightning quick responses to engagement keep that momentum going by boosting your post. Set aside a budget each month for boosted/promoted posts and don’t be afraid to throw a little bit of money behind them to increase both visibility and engagement. This also works well with Events. Make sure the most important aspects of your campaign get in front of your audience.

Time factors in because as your posts age they become less effective. Older posts show up less often in the feeds of your page fans to make way for new content. That means if there’s no new content to keep you going you slip out the range of visibility.  Stay relevant and post regularly without over posting and you’ll see your campaign grow through consistency.

In truth the land of Social Media isn’t quite as nebulous as it initially may appear. There are ways to connect and once you’ve bridged the gap and started to engage with your audience you become more visible and more exciting. Knowing is half the battle and on social media as in fitness consistent action will get you to your goals. Now get out there and get social!