The truth is I love and hate social media content.

What’s wrong with it I hear you cry? Well, in my opinion, social content can be inauthentic, self-promotional, self-perpetuating, clickbait nonsense. There I said it! People sharing meaningless stuff they believe will get likes but for no real reason and tagging in irrelevant people to gain more traction.

The truth is, though, likes and followers really don’t mean very much, except to give you a nice little ego-stroke. This is something I stress to clients fairly often. It is actually about what you DO with any engagement that counts.

It is quite simple really; social content needs firstly need to engage, and then any interaction needs to be followed up. That is how you really capitalise on online content.

So first things first. Engagement.

If you are an estate agent, guess what? Liking or sharing online content about dogs, cats, cars, and other memes is probably not going to help people focus on what YOU DO. Try to make all content you associate with relevant to your industry.

Secondly, but MOST importantly is the content needs to be meaningful. Start with the stuff that really floats your boat. Only write content that you LOVE, whether you are excited to attend an estate agency conference, want to share your top tips on post-Brexit house prices or share housing updates by other reputable companies. Whatever it is. If you love it and showcases your passion, other people will most likely get on board with it.

Finally, don’t just be online because. If you hate Twitter and don’t get how it works then maybe it’s not for you. Many people I meet win work in the old-fashioned regular real-life way so why bust a gut and worry about social so much if it’s just a “seen to be doing it” activity? If you are a technophobe, you will post random stuff, too often or just because and get negged out but few likes and follows and put it all in the bin anyway. Counter this by only posting on channels you understand and where you believe your audience to be and only post when you feel you have something “real” to share because then you’ll attract a real response from others.

The other aspect is to follow up.

Yey, my post for 54 likes and 2000 views. So what? To be honest, a good percentage of those will be friends, colleagues and advocates, and the rest only might be people interested in your product or service. More often they like it because it was funny, pretty, shiny and or other.

But how do you know? Ask them?

“Oh hey Carly, I see you liked/commented my post about post-Brexit house prices, are you thinking about buying in the next year? What area do you live in? If you ever need any advice, give me a shout.” 

Look how simple that is? The problem is most of us are a touch ego-maniac and think that anything we put out will be desirable to others. Not only THAT we also think it’ll be SO interesting that people will be knocking down OUR door. Sorry to break it to you but that’s not the case.

Yes, we get interested, but you have to put some effort in too.

My takeaways… 

  • Start with what you love.
  • Reverse engineer this into interesting content for others
  • Focus your content into your key topic or industry
  • Make it personal with storytelling.
  • Post on the social channels you feel will work for you, your audience and that you understand how to use
  • Don’t post all the time – I often say 3/4 times per week. There is a lot of different “research” online, but you need to do what works for YOU.
  • Make the content good quality and visually appealing.
  • Follow up when people engage.

Simples!