Social Media Breakthroughs Have a Simple Formula

Despite all the talk out there about the importance of content and social media to any brand, there’s still no shortage of branded mediocrity in my social media feeds every day. Most of these posts (or updates as they are confusingly called when referring to brands) aren’t astonishingly bad, they’re just lame, in the way that pretty much anything corporate is lame. They just sit there on the screen, failing to give me a reason to engage at all.

So what’s the disconnect here? The modern attention span is supposed to be a hyper-competitive environment, right? What makes brands think they have the luxury of being lame?

The truth is that they don’t, and they never did, and even less so today. There’s too much competition on our screens every day, too many choices. It’s literally dulling our senses. To get an audience to do what you want today, your post needs to stand out from the others, connect in some meaningful way, and bring them into the screen.

Lameness certainly can’t do this, but in truth digital marketers don’t really need to care that much about quality today. There are too many shortcuts available. We don’t need good work anymore, just good metrics.

This sounds like a tragedy, but it’s actually an opportunity. It makes it easier for a brand that’s willing to make a legitimate go of it to stand out on social media. You don’t have to post a masterpiece every time out to get your audience to click. You just need to remember the essentials, competently and consistently.

Now, what’s essential on social media? Every high-performing post that I’ve ever done has had three things going for it — relevance, elegance, and value.

Every failure has been deficient in one or more. I’ll start with the most important.

Relevance

Relevance is established by attracting your audience’s attention, and then making a connection.

This makes it two-thirds of the battle (hence it’s prime importance), with establishment depending primarily on two things — topic and angle.

• Topic: A post’s topic is what attracts your audience’s attention. Its establishment is largely a matter of using keywords and images that categorize the post in your audience’s mind (more on this in the Elegance section).
• Angle: After the topic draws the eye, the angle cements the connection, by demonstrating to the audience that you understand them. To achieve this, you need to know exactly who you’re talking to. Is it the general public? Business decision-makers? People who already know your brand? Strangers who might not know your brand? People in another country? It’s important to consider these things.

You don’t need to actually sound like a member of your audience to prove that you understand them (this can sound manipulative or non-sequitur coming from a brand), you just need to know their hopes, fears, and pain points, and demonstrate these insights in your posts.

However, tailoring the topic and angle of a post along these lines is not easy. It takes the skills of a good creative and copywriter, and the experiences of someone who knows your company, industry, and audience inside and out. I rarely see all this in a typical brand’s social media output.

Elegance

Elegance on social media is an absence of distraction or clutter so that your Relevance and value proposition are conveyed with maximum efficiency. This is achieved by being intuitive and presentable.

Be Intuitive

Intuitiveness is what I see underestimated most often on social media. I can’t tell you how many posts I’ve come across that try to do too much at once, or that pull me in different directions, or that have an unclear call to action, or that I otherwise just can’t make sense of. A mistake in any of these areas usually means failure.

An intuitive post can and must be understood in an instant, because if your post fails to connect in the three seconds needed for it to scroll across their screen, it never will.

Please note: I’m not including videos, gifs, or complex infographic posts here (which must also be Intuitive but the rules are somewhat different because the encounter length is longer). I’m referring to the plain-vanilla text and static image posts that dominate your social media feed every day.

So what makes a post intuitive? It’s mostly basic media tradecraft.

• Imagery: Make it simple and clear. Your eyes shouldn’t have to move to different points in an image to understand it.
• Headlines: The human limit for text perception in a chunk is about seven words. If you must convey something longer, make digestion of your headline easier by breaking it up with a colon, or adding a subhead in a different-sized font.
• Keywords: Keywords and terms should be capitalized so that they stand out from the rest of the text. This aides the categorization process that I mentioned back in the relevance section. But don’t overload your audience’s perception. Having two keywords is fine. Three is pushing it, and more is outright keyword stuffing (which can set off the audience’s clickbait alarm).
• Copy: Be concise. Use words that your audience knows. Clear is better than cute. If your copy is long enough to warrant a “see more,” hide the call to action behind it (CTA visibility is worthless if you don’t make the sale before the break).

Be Presentable

I said presentable here instead of beautiful for a reason, because the former is essential, while the latter is merely nice to have. Beautiful subjects like sports cars, smartphones, and fashions certainly benefit from being beautiful, but blade servers don’t (since it won’t influence the purchasing decision), and neither do a lot of other things.

But every post has to be presentable, which I define here as an absence of ugliness. A small amount of ugliness is an unsightly distraction, like a zit on your face, while a large amount of ugliness is more like a deformity that can make your audience look away.

Ugliness can come from many sources, in both the imagery and copy.

Imagery

For original images, watch your symmetry, alignment, and spacing, as audiences expect a certain four-square professionalism from brands. For photos, watch for fading, blurriness and clutter (I’ve seen many-a-photo ruined by an ill-placed water bottle in the foreground).

Stock photography, on the other hand, requires a different type of vigilance. Generic photography usually does no harm to a post, but a photo that looks staged can actually hurt it. Phoniness means you’re not trying. It’s not ugly, but it has the same effect. Would you click on something from Ken and Barbie?

So what’s the line between generic and phony? Generic photography can suit anyone, but phoniness suits no one.

Copy

For post copy, ugliness can creep up in many areas — spelling, spacing, grammar, and even excessive commas and periods (two is the max for any type of punctuation).

Repetition warrants special attention, because I see a lot of brands out there who think that it’s a good thing to have in a post. It isn’t. Repetition is the text equivalent of slowing way down when you speak. It’s annoying. It treats the audience like they’re stupid. It also overloads the audience’s categorization ability, thereby making the post less Intuitive.

And repetition isn’t just a matter of words; it extends to the meaning as well. I see a lot of posts where the copy simply repeats what the visual conveys. This might seem like a good idea, but it’s actually a mistake. If your audience gets what they need from the visual, their attention can go slack if the copy repeats it (which is not good since that’s usually where your call to action is).

To enhance overall impact, the copy and visual should not repeat each other, but support each other. The easiest way to achieve this synergy is to tailor your copy to the visual, not the visual to the copy, because the former typically takes just a few minutes, while the latter can take hours if you let it.

Value

Value is what closes the deal. It’s what brings your audience into the screen. Every social media post must have value, or offer it.

The bad news with value is that determining it has many of the same complexities as establishing relevance. It’s also somewhat context-dependent. For instance, LinkedIn is a great place to share marketing tips, but a lousy place to share gardening tips. Facebook is pretty much the opposite. Twitter is a good place for both.

The good news with value is that it’s something that content professionals can feel in their bones. When a post is lacking in meat, you just know it.

Amateurs, however, can be led astray, typically by mistaking relevance for value. And while value is intertwined with relevance, they’re not usually the same. Remember that relevance is how you attract and connect with your audience, while value is what gets them to engage. If your audience likes basketball, relevance is established by sponsoring a local team, but value is offered by live-streaming the games.

One exception to this is the pearl-of-wisdom quote post, where the relevance is also the value.