Top Three Lessons Learned in Social Media Marketing

Hello, and welcome to my little slice of the Algonquin College Social Media Certificate Program blog! I’m very excited to put (digital) pen to paper and share some thoughts on the current social media landscape.

My social media journey has been a long one. I’ve been active on Facebook since 2007 and my personal X (formerly Twitter) account has been around since July 2008. Since then, I’ve operated both professional and hobby side-accounts with the goal of marketing content.

In my early days on social media, I ran an Ottawa Senators-themed blog and achieved a moderate readership in the community through sheer link clicks and headlines that caught readers’ interest. Here are a few quick lessons I learned in that time as they related to this personal project.

Image by MedRocky via Adobe Stock.

• Standing out in the crowd today is difficult.
  I started my social media journey at a time where users were still figuring things out as they went. This made it relatively easy to share content — communities were less insular and followers had a more direct relationship than the platform has since fostered.
  
  Since then, however, a rapidly expanding user base and more skillful use of the platform across the board has made it difficult to rise above the noise. It’s no longer enough to put out good content alone.
  
  Gone are the halcyon days of posting the headline and a link and calling it a job well done. Content now needs visual support — X’s own research indicates that users are three times more likely to engage with a post that features visual content. And that additional effort, I would argue, is now the bare minimum for engagement.

Social media posting, once considered almost an afterthought, has evolved to the point of becoming a science.

• Being seen as part of the community helps readers have faith in our content as being worthwhile.
  Especially in areas of discussion that tend to be insular — sports fandom, in my previous Senators blog example — readers don’t tend to appreciate content provided by, for lack of a better term, outsiders.
  
  As a result, a savvy user recognizes that readers want to read content from writers they perceive to be knowledgeable, or at least a known entity. This almost makes it a prerequisite to any content that the author first establish themselves in the community.
  
  My Senators blog was nothing special, admittedly. I had thoughts and I shared them. Where I achieved success was in engaging with the fanbase on social media, outside of my blog posts. As a result, I was seen as a part of the community and my input was deemed to have some worth. Much has changed about social media, but I believe this is one of the more constant elements of any platform.
  
  It also touches on the different types of social media messages as explored in this week’s content: broadcasting may be effective in getting a message out, but it’s through interaction and engagement that the more valuable community-building comes into play and keeps readers feeling a sense of loyalty to us. And this is borne out by internal platform data, too — Facebook’s algorithm, for instance, prioritizes interaction in deciding how to display content to users.

Photo by Julia M. Cameron via Pexels.

• Nothing beats a consistent posting schedule.
  Blogging isn’t the easiest thing in the world. With so many blogs starting out as passion projects, it’s easy to get sidetracked, to run out of ideas, or even to lose the passion that originally drove the content creation.
  
  This, ultimately, is what ended up happening with my aforementioned Senators blog. Concurrently, it showed me the value in consistent posting schedules. As long as I was getting regular content posted, I could create accompanying social media posts that would be displayed in timelines.
  
  But, as my posting frequency dwindled, so too did my social media posts, and so too did my engagement numbers. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that reduced passion leads to reduced posting leads to reduced metrics leads to reduced motivation, which perpetuates the cycle.
  
  So, by the time I tried a revival of the blog, I found that its initial audience simply wasn’t there anymore. Maybe they weren’t seeing the content, maybe they’d grown to love other blogs in mine’s absence, maybe my blog’s followers no longer used the platform, or maybe readers didn’t have faith that the blog would be around for much longer. Regardless of the cause for the failed revival, the root was unquestionably my lack of consistency.

So, there you have it — three takeaways from content marketing in the Web 1.0 days. I’ll have more to share on more recent approaches as the term moves forward, but for now I think I’ve gone on long enough.

What do you think? Have you had any experience in trying and failing to be heard over the noise? Sound off in the comments!

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Patrick Smith
I am a graduate of Algonquin College’s Journalism and Interactive Media Management programs. I work as a project manager at a national not-for-profit organization, with job responsibilities that include social media management.

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Suggested social media posts:

Facebook: Social media is an easy tool to use but one fraught with potential error areas. Providing unique value, community integration and posting frequency are tricky propositions! Click through to the link below and learn from my mistakes. https://algonquincollegesocialmedia.wordpress.com/2024/03/11/top-three-lessons-learned-in-social-media-marketing/

X/Twitter: Getting social media marketing right can sometimes require a few false starts. Read on and learn from my mistakes! What advice would you give to a future social media expert hopeful? #SocialMedia https://bit.ly/3IxPOdS
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