Sorry for the Bulls***

SEO Shark apologize for the mistakes

We have committed a terrible sin.

From the bottom of SEO Shark’s heart, we are so sorry for all the boring social media posts you’ve had to sit through all this time. With all these articles out there, suggesting businesses will be obsolete without posting x amount a day, we fell into the trap of mass-producing content with no real direction. Ultimately, these articles base their recommendations on little to no practical research, and their generic prescriptions come with some hefty side effects.

 

There’s no golden number of posts you can create to magically summon a following; it’s just not that simple. You need to know who you are targeting as well as how, when and where to reach them. From there, you need to find a way to speak to them in a way that is engaging and different from the other 60 million organisations on social media. It doesn’t stop there, you then need to be able to do this consistently, it’s not enough to share a handful of quality posts then revert to subpar – it just won’t work.

 

If you have fallen into the trap of posting as often as a random marketing site tells you to, you might have noticed your average engagement per post dipping, and you’re not alone. Now we aren’t going to make up some random statistic on the engagement drop percentage because where would we even get reliable data for that? It’s going to be different for every single business. What we can say is that following the high-volume, mediocre-post method may get you more clicks in the short term, but this is at the expense of the level of engagement gained from genuine target markets.

 

So, what do you care more about? Random Instagram bots clicking on your page or real people who have a sincere interest in your offering and brand personality? Assuming you chose the latter, you need to ensure your strategy to focuses on form over frequency. You want to create a social media identity for your brand that appeals to the people you are actually targeting and aim to sell to. Forget about numbers; at the end of the day what does having 1 million followers mean if you aren’t getting any real engagement or sales?

 

Here’s our proposition; instead of pressuring your team to post at a particular frequency, you need to ensure you satisfy these two core pillars:

  1. It’s interesting.
    We aren’t saying everyone must find it interesting, just the group of people you’re trying to target. If you decide to make your content universally appealing, it generally just ends up being basic. Interesting also doesn’t mean you need to find an entirely obscure fact to captivate viewers unless of course you can find a way to tie it back to your core business. Don’t let your desire entertain blind you from your fundamental goal or you may end up wasting time and efforts on irrelevant audiences.
  2. It’s shareable.
    Yes, we did just say not to make your posts universally appealing, so what the hell are we on about now? Essentially, by shareable, we mean keep it relatively simple and understandable. Don’t start going into niche topics that only half your audience is going to grasp if you aim to expand your active followers. You want there to be an obvious benefit whether its useful tips, information, styling advice, or even a good laugh. If your audience can derive something valuable from your post, they are much more likely to pass it on to their network of presumably like-minded individuals or businesses.

 

Don’t let the baseless recommendations from whichever marketing “expert” pressure you to create any specific number of posts. If you do not have the capability or even just don’t want to dedicate that much effort into social media marketing, you should only post when you have something worthwhile to contribute. Every organisation is different, so the idea that anyone could suggest that “an extra three posts a week could quadruple your ROI” is just nonsense. For every post you’re about to publish, take a step back and reanalyse it from the scope of our two core pillars. Imagine you came across this post while browsing the platform; Would you find it interesting? Would you share it? No? Probably not worth it then.

 

Well, now it’s time we followed our own advice. Let us make a vow to you right here, right now – No more bulls*** posts. From this point forward, we will only post when we feel we have an actual message to convey and can do it in style. We hope you have it in yourself to forgive us for our mistakes and genuinely hope you learn from them too.