The Secret Ingredient to a Successful Social Media Strategy

You’ve probably read all of the posts, the latest strategies, and all the latest feature upgrades. And you are probably either overwhelmed or confused with it all. Now what? What do I post? Do I use video? How many videos should I make? There are so many different articles written on the topic that often small business owners or entrepreneurs that are just starting out get easily paralyzed from all the new information. And I’m sure that you’ve read all of those gimmicky articles that promise if you just follow their advice you will not only get ahead of your competition but will be the top businesses in your industry… blah blah blah.  Yep, I’ve heard it all as well.There is wisdom to trying out new things and experimenting with anything you can get your hands on. That part is true. You need to try new platforms, new content styles, new formats to tell your story with. But there is one piece of advice that stands out above all the rest and that is the secret ingredient of any successful social media strategy. And the secret is – consistency. We are going to break down consistency for you into three areas of your social media strategy – publishing, medium, and analytics.

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Bring consistency into your publishing

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One of the key things to do is to publish content on a consistent schedule. Gary Vaynerchuk talks about this phenomenon where a lot of entrepreneurs expect results right away where in reality they might get 20 views on each of their videos for the next 6 months. Gary himself said that he had 10 views on his earliest videos for an entire year. When you set out to publish content you have to do so consistently. People naturally respond positively to your social media, engage with it more, subscribe to your updates, when they know that your publishing schedule is consistent. They grow to rely on your to pump out new content and they are excited to have something stable they can consume every day/week/month. The frequency of your content is important too, but consistency is even more so. YouTube actually ranks channels higher that publish consistently. For example, a channel like Unsheathed Reviews that just started out a month ago already has relatively high rankings for several keywords because they schedule a video to be published every single day. I don’t know about you, but there are not enough grandmas for every one of the people working for Unsheathed Reviews to add up to the 53 subscribers they have now. That would mean a lot of grandma adoptions (is that a thing)?

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Pick a medium and go with it

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A lot of people flip-flop between different content medium and between different social media platforms. If you chose to publish a lot of video content but are not seeing “immediate results” then quit being such a millennial and keep at it! Each content medium should be respected, there are clear advantages and disadvantages to every single one, but if you keep changing mediums without playing the long-term game of patience then you won’t get anywhere. There is no magic pill or potion. Anyone that created viral content knows that it takes many iterations and sometimes years to perfect what you’re doing and to build an engaged audience and a successful social media strategy. Creating a viral video or post on the first try is like winning the lottery – even If you get all that money it will make you miserable (miserably impatient).The first post that I wrote on LinkedIn where I was actively trying to get views/likes/comments actually got me 20,000 views, which was a great start. It also gave me 28 subscribers on my handy dandy ManyChat subscription list.

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Get grounded with your KPIs

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Analytics is the key to any successful social media campaign. The people that do best are the ones that are constantly analyzing their results and changing things to get a better performance of each and every post. One of the incredible examples of analytics-driven business practices is Video Fruit. Bryan (the CEO) was so obsessed with his Google Analytics that he created whole products and courses about the topics that were most popular on his blog (after looking at the analytics). And the guy got to $1 million in revenue pretty quick.

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Lesson learned – analyze everything you do

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Analyzing is important but sticking with consistent KPIs is even more important. Some companies try to change things up a lot, change the things that they are tracking and get confused easily. When I was working for SolarCity back in 2014-5 the company was going through a huge growth period. As a result, there came a few months after the initial growth spurt when the growth was less than desirable. So what they did was to try and throw some different KPIs (key performance indicators) at us and to see what would stick. Instead of more organization and order we all got confused and had to re-think our entire strategy. I was part of the sales organization, and as you know, second-guessing yourself is probably every salesman’s Achilles heel. So stick with the same KPIs for at least a quarter, 6 months, even a year. And try to grow your business consistently. Bryan from Video Fruit focused on his traffic (page views) for a while there and got that up to 300k unique visits back in 2016.

Recap

What’s the magic pill in social media? Consistency. All the greats talk about it, and now we’ve said it here on Eclincher’s awesome blog. Let it be etched in history, and we hope you learned a lot from this post. Have you been consistent? What have you learned from it? Please, let us know what you thought in the comments.