Know when you are the product, and engage the platform flow.
It is well-established in the social media attention economy that when you do not pay for a product, you are the product. However, it is not always clear to content creators what that means. Creators need to analyze the performance features of different platforms and adjust their content to make sure that their performance wishes align with the platforms’ respective presentation incentives. If you understand what each social media platform considers profitable content from their perspective, you are more likely to be picked up by their presentation algorithms and also meet customer expectations for the platform.
Alternatively, breaking form and platform expectations with your content can sometimes break the monotony of the consumption stream, grabbing attention in unexpected ways – but don’t count on it all the time.
There are similar strategies that are deployed for search engine optimization and content optimization. To some degree social media verticals are simpler to play to because they often represent a far more structured and transparent environment and provide creator account management tools that give you many of the statistics you need to evaluate how your content is performing.
Most companies in social media build up digital twin profiles using statistics automatically generated from your browsing activity and content interactions. Feeding these activities – their duration, their frequency, their level of intent, their relationships – into previously trained models provides companies with relatively accurate demographic details. A digital twin takes a long time to fully develop, but as the internet has been around for decades and many individuals were born into the internet age it is possible for business to build a model of who you are, what you do, what resources you have and what you engage with. A digital twin – for the purposes of modeling your behavior when presented with content – acts pretty much like you would.
By compounding their own proprietary modeling data with external model data, companies can build a holistic view of your consumer persona – how you consume content, where, at what price points, how often, etc. A single digital twin carries many contextual personas, and each persona likely is also related distinctly to the platform it engages with. So your consumer persona on Amazon – where you pay for goods and where you tend to try to find long tail items that are atypically found in brick-and-mortar stores – may be similar to your Facebook persona or your YouTube persona. Even though you may consume content on all of these platforms, and certain demographics will definitely carry over as part of your digital twin model, behavioral characteristics will likely deviate between personas.
It is possible to get basic reach through social media based on characteristic groups found in digital twin models – the fundamental characteristics gleaned across all of the platforms you participate in – but deeper and more valuable reach can be achieved through fabricating and building character personas that represent the particular habits of unique platform consumption.
This is typically why you will see a social media engagement rollout for single verticals or closely related verticals. It takes some time to tune and adjust both your consumer personas and your internal business models to address the interests of those personas.
Personas can be built manually, though most benefit from strategically paced automated processes that follow outlined behavioral expectations. Essentially you look at the niche buyer you are wanting to address and craft personas revolving around appropriate topics, habits, cross-sells, influencers, etc.
Taking the above strategies and understanding into account, there are also basic questions you should ask yourself when addressing your content and where you are trying to make a mark.
What are the effective ways to communicate to potential community members on social media?
Considering the audience and the limitations and features of the platform you are using, are you trying too hard for personal engagement or trying to address troubleshooting in an open setting? Are you not addressing valid customer comments and concerns, or do you allow service conversations to dominate your feed? Have you got different internal personas for addressing different communications needs?
Have you established consistent tone and brand?
Do you allow affiliate marketers or communications partners to generate their own content? Are partners able to use logos and product images freely? Is the voicing and presentation of your entity online consistent and unique enough to demonstrate you are the authority for that entity? Have you taken all the available steps to verify your identity on the platform?
Can you offer value to niche communities?
Have you established your presence in industry blogs and forums? Do you have representatives who participate in knowledge seeking sites where people may be asking questions about products? Do you offer answers to questions on your social media hub or root pages? Do you use any tools to tie back your customer or prospect communications with appropriate communications channels in-house?
Do you use business and locale pages and reviews efficiently?
Have you got an integrated mechanism to engage, solicit and evaluate reviews and customer feedback? Are your business hub pages that are not directly tied to social media connected to your social media hubs and your main web presence? Is the representation of your entity in terms of company information, logos, images and other information in sync and accurate?
Do you use sentiment analysis tools?
Have you got tools that look at the statistical language and use machine learning to determine mood and sentiment for your brand or industry news? Are you able to leverage sentiment indicators to trigger strategic promotional content publication?
If you aren’t confident in these areas and would like to consult with us on the powerful technology that can be deployed to get you solid results, set up a free discovery call so that we can talk through where you are at and where we might be able to bolster your social media promotional efforts.