In the ever-evolving social media landscape the only constant is change. There is so much transition that sometimes it’s easy for us to become deaf to the noise and complacent in our actions and practices. Especially as small business owners, it often feels like an unnecessary rat race to chase current social media trends, and often that is a correct assessment.
However, there has been a profound and significant change to social media recently that I want you to pay very close attention to because it could potentially be a massive opportunity and have a huge impact on your business. You are likely already aware of Tik Tok’s surge in popularity over the last few years. Tik Tok has become such an influence on the social media landscape that now almost all other platforms have adopted a Tik Tok like algorithm that prioritizes a user’s interests rather than just their connections. In other words, many platforms are adopting and prioritizing an “interest graph” based algorithm rather than a “social graph” algorithm. This represents a unique opportunity for small and medium size businesses to create organic (unpaid) content on their social media platforms and have significant reach to relative audiences, even if they don’t’ posses a large following.
Previously most social media platforms, other than Pinterest, emphasized content from a user’s connections and those who they interacted with the most. This gave an advantage to larger and more established companies who amassed a larger follow on their social channels. But the popularity of Tik Tok has changed the priority of all platforms to show users more content that aligns with their interests rather than primarily who they follow. You’ve probably noticed in your news feeds on Facebook and Instagram that you are seeing more “suggested” posts than ever before from accounts you don’t follow. This is a new renaissance for organic content. Yes, it’s true that we will still not get the same amount of organic reach as we did on most platforms 5-10-15 years ago. However, we can now get more organic reach on the same platforms than we could even 18 months ago. More importantly, the organic reach is now more targeted to be relevant to the audience which consumes it. This represents a massive opportunity for smaller companies that don’t have significant budgets or followings.
Therefore, companies that are not producing an immense amount of organic social media content today are leaving a ton of potential revenue on the table. It’s never been more important than now to be creating relative contextual content for your core audiences on social media. In upcoming blogs I’ll go into specific details about what your business should be doing to put out strategic organic content at scale. In the meantime, immediately begin or increase your organic posting on all social channels that brings value to 3-5 targeted audiences that represent your core customers. Value is defined as something that your audience finds educational, informative, or entertaining. A combination of all three is ideal.
By putting out a large amount of contextual content to your core audiences we can also make more informed decisions about our paid advertising campaigns. When we produce enough relative content, we can find out what our core audiences really want to consume. Then we can take the over performing organic posts and tweak them a bit to be an effective paid ad. This strategy will allow us to have more effective paid ad campaigns because we already know that the core audiences respond well to the content, and they find it relative to them. Which greatly increases the likelihood of the ad to convert.
This is an exciting time for small businesses to really dive into content creation for social media and have it move the needle significantly in terms of sales and building brand for their company. This is certainly one social media trend we want to make sure we are fully capitalizing on, before our competitors do.