Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 0 As social media professionals, our jobs are hard enough. The 2016 CMO Survey revealed that 40% of companies aren’t happy with the performance of their social strategies. Despite the difficulty to prove ROI and the general dissatisfaction that can be felt throughout our organizations, social media will make up almost 21% of the average business’s marketing spend in five years. As budgets and responsibilities grow, how can we continue to adapt and change with the times? Forget creating “original content.” We have become obsessed with creating “viral content,” growing our followers and proving ROI. Original content is an overused phrase that usually describes blog posts. The process usually goes something like this. We have very good intentions and want to help solve a problem for our audience. “Great! We will write a blog post/ebook/guide/video then share it on social.” When in reality, the roles should be reversed. By creating bite-sized content on social first, you can determine if a blog post or video is worth the time to produce. Before investing the time and resources to create long-form content, test out the topics on social. Blogs should really be written for search engines — to help you attract an audience that is actively searching for the information that you have to offer — while social media posts are for the audience who you engage with every day. While you’re testing, rethink what you consider to be original content altogether. Let’s face it, 90% of the time, your content isn’t original. It’s your own rendition of an already existing idea. Social media needs a little more respect than being treated like a bulletin board for your latest blog posts. Doesn’t it deserve it’s own content? Think about it. When was the last time that you read a full blog post? All of the words? When was the last time that blog post led you to take action? While content marketing is necessary, it cannot replace the creation of unique platform-specific content. While you can drive traffic between channels, you should understand the role that each plays in your strategy. Instead, create platform-specific MVPs. In many cases, your social media audience can be greater than the daily views that you get on your site or blog. Don’t waste all the eyes you can get in real-time each and every day waiting on your blog-posting schedule. Start with an MVP for each one of your social media channels. If you are familiar with the Lean Startup Process, MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product, but for the purpose of this article, we will go with (social) post. Your Minimum Viable Post is a post that captures the essence of the story you want to tell, without all the bells and whistles. It’s the most basic version of what you ideally want to create and requires little to no resources. This could be a new Instagram Story segment, a new topic you want to discuss on Twitter, or using a video slideshow instead of a photo album on Facebook. Blog posts can be useless if you aren’t amplifying the content properly across social, have the right call to action, or aren’t optimizing for SEO. Many blog posts on the Internet go unread. Your MVP will help you make your channels more engaging and decide what topics could benefit from long-form content. Apply the Lean Startup Method to social media this quarter, and allow it to determine what kinds of content are going to thrive on your channels in the new year. 1. Publish something quickly. 2. Measure its progress. 3. Apply what you learned to the next thing you publish. Fail Fast. Waiting to have the perfect product can cause you to miss an opportunity. You want to dive into opportunities while they’re hot and over-thinking it will cause it to pass you right by. You have to give yourself room to experiment freely so you can arrive at what works. Fail fast. Jump on a platform early. Try it out before you invest time and energy on a full-blown strategy, graphics and assets. MVPs can take various forms such as: Using Periscope or Facebook Live to test out a new YouTube Channel concept or an advice thread on Twitter to test a blog post topic. If your audience is interested and engaged, then work on creating polished, evergreen content. Let’s say that you want to roll out a new segment for your Instagram story. Do not wait until you’re “ready,” have a DSLR camera, a lighting kit, and can afford a video editor. Don’t count an idea out due to budget. Start with the basics, and if you get an engaged response, then expand to create a more polished final product. If you don’t test your concept before you launch it, you can end up disappointed when it flops. Social media isn’t about perfect posts or immaculate content. It’s about storytelling, and storytelling is about relationships. People want the real, raw, and behind the scenes. Why do you think reality TV, Periscope, and Snapchat are so popular in the first place? Engagement is conversation not content. You can create engagement with a picture of a baby or a cat fairly easily, but it takes a true pro to create conversation around their brand that is authentic to them and their audience. Instead of trying so hard to have conversations, you should be focused on starting them. The Instagram posts that people tag their friends in, the tweets that are retweeted and commented on, the Facebook posts that erupt into a full blown discussion in the comments — That’s social media success. That’s engagement. @mentions aren’t. Followers aren’t. Action trumps audience any day of the week. Brands who are not afraid to look at themselves for what they truly are and speak the language of the people they truly serve, can connect with audiences better than brands who engage based on who they want to be. What would happen if you let yourself be authentic and impulsive in 2017? Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.Learn how to publish your content on B2C Author: Jay Leonard Jay is a UK-based cryptocurrency expert, specialising in fundamental analysis and medium to long term investments. Jay has a great deal of hands-on experience in analysing financial markets and performing technical analysis. Jay is currently focusing on the institutional adoption of cryptocurrency and what it means for the future of … View full profile ›More by this author:Hotbit Exchange Forced to Suspend Service As it’s Under Criminal InvestigationCameo CEO Steven Galanis Wallet Hacked – $231k Worth of NFTs StolenMastercard CFO sees Growth Opportunities in Crypto