Start Here Social Media Marketing
Stop Consuming Content (for a little bit)
If you haven’t posted your first piece of content, stop consuming content and start producing it. It all starts with a post, a video, or a blog post. The point of getting started is to start. If you are having trouble posting your first piece of content, continue reading, but the answers you seek are within your first post.
How To Get Over The First Hurdle?
The most arduous part of social media is getting started and staying consistent.
Say I split a class of photographers into two groups where one group needed to take 10,000 photos within the semester, and the other group needed to create only one professional photograph. Who would come out with the best picture? If you chose the first group, you are correct. Not only would they take better pictures, but they would have a library of amazing photos within the 10,000 pictures.
“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst” (Henri Cartier-Bresson).
What does this have to do with social media?
You can create great content, but if you only post once a month, you can’t compete with someone who did it 10,000 times. Creating content is like flexing a muscle; if you make 300 articles or videos, you will get better and create content faster.
You aren’t alone in this venture in creating content. At Addzey, we develop tens of thousands of pieces of content for other businesses, but when we create content for ourselves, we drag our feet or ask if it would be good enough. You need to get past this hurdle by staying consistent with creating content and just starting to put out content even if it isn’t up to your standards (yet).
How To Get Over Your Fear of Posting?
Scroll through your feed on social media and try to remember the previous two videos you watched. Chances are you can’t remember what you watched. Not only do you not remember the videos, but you also don’t know the person who posted, you don’t know about their business, and you don’t care about their product.
Remember this: Most people will never see or remember your content (see what we did there).
Use this information to your advantage. While most people won’t see or even care about your content, use that as fuel to create whatever you like. Think of it like singing in the shower. No one would know if you have a great voice singing in the shower. Even if you post yourself singing, most people wouldn’t even know who you are if you posted it once a month, but if you post your singing 300 times a week, there isn’t a world where you wouldn’t become famous.
Don’t do it for the followers, views, or likes:
Authenticity is what sells your content. If you are trying to post content for views and likes, you are going about it the wrong way. What you want is engaged viewers. I would rather have an audience of 100 people who comment and share my content with others than an audience of 10,000 that doesn’t. To get people to share and comment on your videos, you need to make it easy for them to do so and to gain some value from doing so (we discuss this more in part 3).
Follow these simple steps when creating content.
Create content that helps you and your audience
Be authentic and share both your wins and losses
Make it easy for them to continue to view your content
Create content for you and your audience.
Most businesses create content that entices their audience to purchase a product.
Instead, create content that helps every level of user within your niche.
Why should you create content to help everyone within your niche?
Think of it this way. Would you work with a company that helped you along the way to achieve your goals or some company that is trying to sell you a product? I would want to help, work with, promote, and partner with a company that helped me out, especially in the beginning stages.
You should make paid ads, but focus on creating content that entices your audience first. When you provide your audience with value, it spawns affiliates that can help promote your products exponentially by providing your audience with something valuable.
Share your wins and losses.
Create the journey of your business from both the highs and lows. For example, within a week, we lost a client who paid us $6,000 per month (due to restructuring), and a business that just signed a contract went out of business. Show that you are human. It's not all about the wins.
The few big wins make a company successful, but the losses can show your values and what you learned. That creates a deep and meaningful relationship with your audience.
Make it easy for them to view your content:
If you need to jump through 17 clicks for someone to find your videos or articles, you’re doing it wrong unless it helps the end user. They need to be able to find you quickly and consume all of your content on a subject at a moment's notice.
Have you ever seen a reel on Instagram of a movie divided into 67 parts, and you jumped in on post 58 and wanted to watch the beginning? You find yourself scrolling through their posts only to discover that you can’t find number 1. Make your content instantly accessible within 2-3 clicks to view all of your content.
How much should I post?
You will never hit a limit on how much you should post. Guess how many pieces of content top content creators create per week.
50 pieces of content per week
100 pieces of content per week
200 pieces of content per week
300 pieces of content per week
If you answered D, you would be correct.
Top content creators make 15,600 pieces of content per year! 52X more than average creators. This amount of content is what it takes for your social media to gain traction.
We aren’t saying to start with posting 300 times a week. We recommend hitting 50 pieces of content per week. That is a little over seven posts per day. If you do this on multiple platforms, it can add up quickly. Don’t repost the same content across your different social media platforms. Choose what works on those platforms and curate your content to that audience.
I want to make a content schedule, and I don’t know where to start:
Avoid creating a content schedule in the beginning. We learned from experience that you should start posting consistently first. Even if you preplan your content, you aren’t taking the right actions to achieve your goals. The goal is to produce and post content that the viewer enjoys. Not to create a content schedule that ten videos get released out of the 400 you have written in your schedule.
Post something once a day for a week. Anything that comes to your mind is fine. A picture of your dog wearing a hat, a poem you wrote, a toilet you fixed, or anything you find enjoyable.
Once you can do that consistently for a week, continue posting, and now you can start creating your content schedule. You will find the most efficient content schedule by posting when it is most convenient for you during that week.
Recap of what we learned:
Post your first piece of content. Stop consuming and start producing.
Get over the first hurdle of creating content by posting as much as possible.
“Most people will never see or remember your content.” Use that to your advantage. Don’t fear posting great content.
Don’t do it for followers, likes, or views. Create content that helps you and your audience. Be authentic! Share your wins and losses, and let your audience find your content easily.
Start with posting once a week and gradually increase the amount you post.