Over the Christmas break, I caught up on some reading. While crammed in the backseat of a rackety Subaru crawling along the Pacific Highway, I read Christos Tsiolkas’ Merciless Gods. Mid-morning, and nursing a crippling hangover in my tent at Nambucca Heads, I finished 1984. George Orwell is now my new favourite twentieth-century socialist. And I ticked off Richard Flanagan’s acclaimed The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Why do I tell you this? Because so far, I’ve managed to keep at least one New Year’s Resolution, and it’s all about reading. The reading didn’t stop once my holidays ended. Now I’m back at work, it seems I’m actually succeeding in cultivating the habit of tapping (clicking?) into the wealth of professional opinion, tips and knowledge that float around, delightfully and patiently, in the infinities of cyberspace.
Blogs. One – 4 Social Media Commandments for 2015 (And Beyond) from American agency Shift Communications – has particularly struck me. Why? I think it is because it offers such a subtle and refreshing insight into our approach to managing our social media presences, and in turn maximising our social media impressions.
1. Thou shall not talk about yourself 24/7. Absolutely.
2. Thou shall not use fifty hashtags per social post. #Amen.
3. Thou shall not join social networks that have nothing to do with you. Agreed
4. Thou shall use your head before posting. Always.
These commandments (let’s face it, they’re more like guidelines. The Almighty isn’t going to smite you if you misbehave) are important not only because I hate having my newsfeed littered with banalities and trivialities and not-another-photo-of-your-cat-that-was-cute-the-first-time-I-saw-it-three-months-ago-but-hasn’t-been-in-the-eighty-nine-days-since, but because the glue that holds these four commandments together is the principle of selectivity.
In a blind rush to increase our social media audiences and maximise our views/retweets/likes, we can embark on the strategic folly of a social media bombardment. Sometimes it is easy to forget that the salience, relevance and attractiveness of our posts are inversely proportional to our social media saturation. Rather than adopt a mantra of ‘Post often, post often’, we would do better with a mantra of ‘Post less, post well’.
So, for 2015, don’t talk about yourself 24/7. It’s boring and it loses the interest of the audience.
Do not use fifty hashtags. Use few. Be succinct. It has more #impact.
Do not join groups that have nothing to do with you. You won’t reach your target audience here. Like a surfer looking for waves from the peak of Mt Kosciusko.
Finally, think before you post. If you aren’t certain that a post is relevant to your strategic message, it probably isn’t. Never make it easy for your target audience to ignore you.
From everyone at Hugo Halliday, Happy New Year.