Stop. We are doing social media wrong
TO: Social Media Team
FROM: Azleen Abdul Rahim, CMO
SUBJECT: Stop. We are doing Social Media wrong
Guys,
Azleen here. Please drop everything you are doing right now. We are moving in the wrong direction, and frankly, we are doing it wrong. Sorry for telling you this right now, as I just noticed our KPI Dashboard on social media isn’t progressing well. I guess you may have missed my first memo. Listen, we will only run a twice-a-week posting schedule moving forward. Nothing more. Since we are in a B2C vertical, our focus channels are Google Business Profile, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok. Yes, you read it right. We must post regularly on Google Business Profile, too.
I want you to play social media in three precise ways if we want to unlock growth.
One, we play the organic game. This is for people to validate us. This is where a visitor decides if we are legit, real, and credible. I want simple, high-quality and visually-driven awareness posts. Write a sharp caption, tag/mention the relevant people or companies, and pair it with an authentic image or video that accurately represents us. Again, quality visual matters. Social media is always visual-first, caption second. Whether you are summarising our magazine’s content, showing off our milestones, or featuring our people, the rule is to share, not to preach or pitch. We aren’t here to tell people how to live their lives or bark orders at them to buy. Remember, do not have URLs to external sites in the caption. Social media platforms don't like their users going off the platform.
Two, you must understand that social media is a pay-to-play game. Organic reach is almost non-existent if we are on the Business Page side, and it never gives us the scale we need. We are setting aside RM20 per day to run ads non-stop. These cannot be random posts. This is where we run our call-to-action content, storytelling that leads to a subtle, sophisticated lead-generation push. We are also here to meet our secondary social media objective, which is to push our products and services. The thing is, we do it with enough class that it never feels like a hard sell. We are stretching our reach far beyond our current followers to pull new eyes into our ecosystem.
And three, we weaponise user-generated content. This is our most underutilised asset. I want you to start this as soon as possible. We are going to take the images and videos our customers are already posting about us and make them our own. We will write captions that align with our voice, tag that customer, and credit each person for the visual. It sounds simple because it is, yet it is arguably the most powerful way to tap into their networks and force their followers to take notice of us. It is the ultimate social proof.
Guys, if you execute these three pillars with discipline, I anticipate three things will happen. Our follower count will grow because we are finally visible. Our inquiries will increase because our storytelling is hitting the mark. And finally, we will see a surge of visitors to our website and other digital assets.
This is the new standard when it comes to social media. Our outbound marketing is producing growth at a massive rate right now, and people are coming to our website and other assets to validate us. Social media is one of those assets. And we need to make them stay.
If you need more ideas, text me.
Azleen.
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