No one cares about you – they care about how you can solve their problems. Write for your readers.
These two expressions epitomize the most important marketing (and social media) concept: relevance. How often have you seen a post, picture, tweet, or comment that adds zero value? Or where the signal-to-noise ratio is, well, noisy?
When it comes to using social media as a professional tool, there is a subtle shift that must happen. Instead of a self (or corporate) focus, the post must be designed to be user-relevant, and user-focused. It’s true that celebrities (and politicians) often break this rule, but they would do better if they were more relevant.
Social relevance isn’t rocket science – here are five tips that can help:
- Define the primary and secondary audience for your Facebook and Twitter updates, tweets, videos, and blogs.
- Define the overall goal and the high level messaging that you need each audience to adopt.
- Brainstorm on the key information needs of the target audiences. And if you’re not sure, ask. The intersection of this and your goal/messaging should define your overall theme.
- Brainstorm specific post topics within this theme.
- Seek to engage, not just broadcast. A great barometer of relevance is the degree of engagement. If there are no shares, likes, or comments, your post may not have hit the mark.
This week’s action plan: What’s your signal-to-noise ratio? This week, review all of your social posts, using this five-point checklist as your criteria. (Are the posts really written for a targeted audience? Does it appear that there is an underlying goal? Are the topic choices important to the audience? And on a similar theme? Is there engagement?) If the posts are too wide-ranging and diffuse, then start writing for your reader: they will care about you once you begin solving their problems.
Competitive insight: Reviewing your competitor’s social posts can often give you insight to their marketing strategy: reverse engineering what they have been saying, provides visibility to their priorities and goals.