We’ve all been there, we come up with a great piece of content for one of our social channels and feel like we’ve just got to click that ‘boost’ button to make sure as many people as possible see our witty works of genius. Look carefully though and you’ll find that many successful brands out there do not in actual fact boost all of their posts and certainly not all of their successful ones. This is because judging content ahead of time is difficult. Who knows how successful a post could be through organic shares and likes. Many posts do not need to be boosted and can even go viral without any manipulation. It is also hard to know when exactly you should boost your posts as many can suddenly gain traction later than expected. As a brand you want to exploit Social Media for all that it is capable of doing for you and this means getting your content out there to the biggest possible audience. The question is how do we know what is worth promoting.
The most obvious indicator of whether or not a post is worth boosting, can be based on past performances. By analysing closely which of your previous posts gained the most traction, you can start to get a feel for which sorts of content are most favoured by your audience. What type of subject matter will your audience want to engage with? If however there is very little data for you to analyse, or if you don’t have enough previous posts to be able to gauge any sort of patterns, study your competitors. Look at what the brands who are similar to you are posting and what sort of content tends to elicit reposts and interactions.
To make light-work of this mammoth task, it is well worth your while to use Social Media analytics tools to do the bulk of the groundwork for you. A good tool for this sort of Social Media analysis is SocialBakers. It allows you to find brands in your industry with a high volume of posts that audiences talk about and engage with. You can look through these posts and get some ideas. Lastly, you can see if these brands sponsored posts, i.e the ones that get boosted are doing better than the organic ones. The final part is tricky of course, as many posts aren’t tagged as sponsored.
Anyone carrying out research into various brands Social Media successes will notice that some posts which gain a lot of organic likes and shares and interactions, do so because of a very simple Social Media strategy. The strategy is often that the brand in question has opted to directly address it’s audience and ask for interactions, thus opening up a conversation. For example, many brands ask their fans to like, share, and comment on a particular post in return for a small prize. This not only encourages fans to share the brands messaging, thus increasing brand awareness, it also strengthens the relationship between brand and audience through conversation and interaction. It can often end up that through the running of a competition, a brand saves more money than if they sponsored their posts. If the terms of your competition are simply that for every share your follower wins a £3 gift card/coupon, what you as a brand get for that £3 in terms of shares, interactions and positive word of mouth, could be more lucrative than if you spent a similar amount or more on boosting the post.
A particular type of post which would serve any brand well to promote, is new product posts. This is because you are obviously promoting your products and encouraging direct sales, thus increasing your revenue and you are also allowing your customers to easily ask questions about your new product. For example, when you pin or boost a post, those posts remain prominent on your channel for a significant time period. Customers who have queries about a product, will straight away see a post that relates to said product and post their questions as replies on these posts. Your brand is then able to directly address these questions, giving the consumer the information they need to then make their purchase. Being able to interact with consumers and address their concerns about your products, is one of the key reasons brands should have for using Social Media. It must be said that in order to use Social Media in this way, requires serious man power.
Remember you are showing off your customer service skills, so don’t leave the posts un-manned for too long. Immediacy is key to great service.
By identifying what other brands in your industry are doing on Social Media, you can start to build an idea of the types of posts you should be boosting and what types you should leave to organic growth. Create content that fits your brand and remember that new product posts are great ones to boost. Current content, trending topics and click bait can be left to organic growth.
