There are thousands of articles and videos on the Internet about social media marketing, and they all say the same thing. They say you need quality content, you need to post 14 times per week, and then they give you your social media hack, like engaging with your audience, managing your community, staying consistent and so forth. Yet, if you have actual experience with social media marketing, you know that their advice is useless. If you have ever tried to grow your brand’s social media presence, then you know that their advice is nonsense. Here is the ugly truth about how to improve your social media presence…but you won’t like them.
Stop Looking for Smart Ways to Improve Your Social Media Presence
When people say “Smart,” what they really mean is “Lazy.” When people say, “Work smart, not hard,” they mean, “Find a way to cheat, to be lazy, and don’t work hard.” There are no lazy ways to improve your brand’s social media presence. You need to work hard and you need to work lot. It sounds a little counter-intuitive, but it is almost not worth all the effort you are going to put in.
Dispelling Common Misconceptions
Wait a minute, if all these articles say the same things about branding and social media marketing, there must be a lick of truth in it.
No…No there is not. People research social media marketing, they find the same articles at the top of Google and YouTube, and they recreate them for their own articles and videos. The articles you are reading, the videos you are watching, and the podcasts you are listening to have never marketed a brand on social media. Even the influencers have no idea how they got so lucky. With all that said, here are a few ways you “Shouldn’t” grow your social media brand presence.
- Follow the Trends – Lots of work to start “Behind” the rest
- Create Viral Content – Don’t invest money and time into getting lucky
- Post 14 Time Per Week – You will lose followers as fast as you pick them up
- Copy Your Competitors – You don’t know how they are generating their success
- Be Consistent – No, try different things until something clicks with your audience
- Create Top Quality Content – Do this after you have a large following on social media
By all means, be as critical as possible. Give all the bad advice a try to see if it works. However, do not fall into the Napoleon Hill trap. This is the primary con/swindle in the book, “Think and Grow Rich.” It says that if something doesn’t work, then you didn’t try hard enough, you didn’t believe hard enough, and so forth. The book is a lie. It is full of easy answers that say you should believe in something to make it true. If you try something on some, and that “Something” doesn’t work, then find something that does. It is my personal opinion about the book in this context. Your opinion may be different.
TikTok is the Rule Breaker
No matter what rules apply to other platforms, they do not apply to TikTok. For example, if you post about Jordan Peterson, Camilla Harris, or Andrew Tate on other social media platforms, your audience shrinks, but on TikTok it grows.
You pay for promotion in advice on TikTok. Mix it up between paying for likes and paying for followers on TikTok and your influence builds a stronger foundation. Also, don’t follow trends on other social media, but TikTok tells you trends in advice, so strongly consider following some of those.
The Dead Stop
A dead stop is when you have a social media account and you simply cannot get new customers or new followers without paying. You can post some great content, and for some reason, people are just not interested in your content. It happens on all of the platforms, especially on Twitter and Instagram.
The dead stop is the natural order of things. It is often the point where most people stop trying, and sadly, there are only two genuine cures. The first is to start pumping money into promoting your content. The second is to pay an influencer to start throwing some attention to your social media profiles. It is a very ugly place to be and it is often where many regular (poorly funded) people become demoralized.
Can you “Work” your way out of it, perhaps with more high-quality content? The answer is mmmm…not usually. People talk about posting all the time and building their audience that way, but they are only attracting bots and quickly disinterested people who drop off as quickly as they enter. Most people who try the “Constantly posting” method will come undone once their crap train stops chugging.
Is There a Way to Cheat?
Go here for more information, and you will see a marketplace where people sell their social media profiles. You can buy a few if you wish. Don’t use them for your primary account (unless you want to). Instead, you post to them and get people to follow your primary channel, or you just spread your marketing and branding message. It is frowned upon by social media networks but isn’t strictly against the rules.
Boosting Posts on Facebook
Set a low budget and give it a try. Do your best to track the results yourself without relying on Facebook’s activity reports. The aim of boosting posts is not for likes, comments, and emoticons. It is for brand/business page followers or for clicks on the links you put into your posts. Start small, test, and re-test to see which gets you the best results. The more you spend on Facebook, then the smaller the returns per dollar.
Avoid Twitter at All Costs
Twitter is mostly bots and is a very rigged system that doesn’t allow you to make any progress. Do not waste your time. The engagement you get will never turn into genuine influence or sales. Use a platform like GETTR instead. It isn’t as popular, but at least the people who follow you are real people. Twitter is a mess until Elon buys it up and fixes it.
Set Low Prices for YouTube Promote
When you promote a post on YouTube, the metrics you read on your report are not even close to the numbers you actually receive on YouTube. If the metrics say your advert was clicked 100 times, it was probably only clicked 20. Feel free to pay for a bit of promoting on YouTube but remember that the value for money is very low.
When you set up YouTube promotions on Google Ads, you need to set a very low daily budget, and set an end-time for your campaign of three weeks or a month. If your campaign runs for just a week, then the quality of clickers is pretty poor. If you offer up a higher daily budget, your budget will be harvested by click spammers and Google will pay far more for clicks than it ever should.
What About All The Others?
Far be it from this article to explain the mechanics for all the social media networks, but the best advice is that you try them all. Give each one a good amount of your time to see which draws the easiest attention. Does that attention turn into sales? Can you use that attention to influence your other social media accounts?
Is Rumble Worth The Effort?
Think of Rumble like YouTube for adults, and YouTube with far fewer viewers. Some people wonder if it is worth creating content just for Rumble, and the answer is complicated. You are going to experience the “Dead Stop” problem quite often, but if you create good content and don’t post too often, you can create a foundation that will pay off in the long run. The people on Rumble are slow to discover but are loyal to a fault. Cheap and nasty tactics simply do not work on Rumble, but that also means that when you get new followers, then they are going to stick around for a long time.
Conclusion – What is the Answer?
There is no answer. The articles you are reading are lying to you. They are giving you easy answers. After enough experience, you will understand the value of what has been written in this article. Each social media is like a big metal safe of its own design. You have to find a way of cracking each one differently, you have to know when they pay, when to stay, and when to walk away.
You need to experiment to find what works for your brand. Do not confuse “Attention” with success. Some brands have a massive following, but they simply cannot sell a product. One hundred followers and one lead is better than 5000 followers and one lead.
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