Do you simply not know what to post on your company’s social media anymore? Let’s go back to point 0, understand how much you’ve strayed away, and correct the course. 

Putting aside all complex digital marketing processes you’ve dabbled in over the years, you must remember that people get on social media platforms so they can:

1. communicate with others

2. express thoughts and opinions

It seems straightforward enough, doesn’t it? Yet marketers and business owners still struggle with social media. 

Most companies create social media pages but do not publish content on them. They know they should have regular posts, but they are directionless when it comes to the kind of social media content that will boost their engagement. 

This is a good worry to have. This type of business owner, as paralyzed in action as they are, understands that irrelevant content can hurt your brand.

It’s easy to fail on social media

The difference between a business with a successful social media page and a business with a social media page that doesn’t generate any leads is intent. 

👍 A social media page that people will want to follow is a page that actively publishes content its customer base finds useful. 

👎 A dead social media page posts randomly, rarely and salesy. 

In the second case, the person managing clearly fails at understanding how social media marketing works. 

Remember the 2 major reasons people spend time on social media platforms mentioned above: to interact with others and to express themselves. 

Pushing promo post after promo post will bounce right off of your social media audience’s behavior. Customers interpret this kind of posting as silly at best and low-effort and spammy at worst. 

No one has any patience for it when there are so many other companies who are doing social media the right way. As great as your products/ services are, if you decide to take your company to social media, then you better commit to it. 

Patiently document your involvement

The best way to not treat your social media posts like an afterthought is to hold yourself accountable. Have a spreadsheet with the types of content you will create and publish as well as the deadlines, and check in regularly. 

Do so even if you miss a deadline or are late to deliver or upload the content. Make notes on the spreadsheet with the reasons why you could not be on time. 

• maybe you had to prioritize something else 
• maybe you felt lost in regards to what to create
• maybe you realized you had trouble hitting the desired word count 

Whatever the reasons, keep track of them as they can help you improve your way of working going forward. 

Perhaps, the patterns you notice tell you that it’d be best to hire a professional, or few professionals for your company to achieve its social media-related goals. 

Perhaps some aspects of the researching, creating, planning, scheduling, and publishing of your social media posts take longer than you’d estimated. 

That’s fine. Leave a note on the spreadsheet briefly commenting on it. This kind of hands-on mapping will help you set more realistic expectations for how your business’ social media success should look in reality.

Be responsible in your social media work

Sooner rather than later you’ll realize that managing your social media page is constant work. There are no stages in the development of social media presence that give you an easy pass:

-📈 establishing your business as an authority = hard, constant work

-⚖️ maintaining your business as an authority = hard, constant work

Even when you’ve made it, you’ve got to keep making it. 

Say your business social media page has reached a notable internal milestone: you’ve got 1000 followers on Twitter. 

As tiresome as the process of getting there was, rewarding yourself with a few weeks of not posting on schedule is not a good move. 

It’s a perfectly understandable idea if you’re running a one-man show and clearly need to rest and wind down, and the completion of a milestone shows you deserve so. 

But strategically speaking that would mean taking a few steps back right as you are building momentum. It could ruin everything you’ve worked for. 

This is why having content prepared in advance is the best way to work on a business social media page. It’s tons of work and you wouldn’t want to deal with feeling completely depleted right as you’re taking off. 

Always be a few posts ahead on your spreadsheet because you’re human. 

Look at more social media pages you enjoy looking at

Knowing what to post on social media as a business can be challenging. If you are just starting you’ll feel you don’t even know where to begin one moment and overwhelmed with ideas the next one. 

Avoid wasting too much time while looking for inspiration by not allowing yourself to slip into daydreaming. Google your top competitors and write down social media tricks that stand out from their social media pages. 

For example, look at their hashtags: 

• how many they are 
• how they are grouped 
• how challenging the language they use is 
• how frequent they appear in posts 
• etc.

And if you think you have a tight grasp on your particular industry’s knowledge, feel free to look for topics and patterns for social media posts on pages that are not related to your domain at all. 

However, you need to be hyper-aware of what your field of interest IS and ISN’T. Otherwise, you can easily be led to believe that what works for industry X will work for industry Y and that could cost you. 

For instance, if you know for certain that ebooks are a big deal for your customer base then you understand that long-form content is the way to go. 

That being said, just because spreading info in Twitter threads is a thing that marketers do nowadays, doesn’t mean you have to publish your ebook on Twitter threads just to have the best of both worlds. 

It means you should publish your ebook as blog posts on your website and then:

• tweet a quote and link to the blog 
• post a few intriguing paragraphs on Facebook and link to the blog 
• pin a booming statistic on Pinterest and link to the blog 

That’s the sane way to promote social media content.

Handhold your audience – existing and future one

On the flip side, you can always ask your social media followers what kind of content they want to see from your business page. But if you want them to engage at all, you should be super specific. 

For instance, if you would like to pick their brains in terms of the types of content they’d like more, don’t just simply ask the question in a status update. 

This is laughable nowadays. People only have a few seconds of attention to engage with you so you need to narrow it down for them and assist them in their decision-making. 

Do this instead: 

• 📊 go to your Google Analytics reports and check out your top performing posts 

• 📢 create a poll-type of post in which you ask them a very specific multiple-choice question tightly related to the top performing content as shown by your analytics reports 

For example, if you sell online courses for digital marketers and notice a clear spike in popularity among your SEO posts, then you can ask your audience to vote on the SEO subtopic they want to learn about next and offer them some choices, say: keyword research, organic search, and guest posting. 

This approach makes it easier for your followers to make a decision and engage with you. They simply won’t sit and ruminate on your question for long otherwise. 

What people expect out of social media is to learn something or about something in a quick, easy, and preferably entertaining way.

Therefore, a big part of getting people to consume your content is putting in the effort to walk them through it in ways you’ll have them coming back for more.

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