One of the most important lessons I found early on social media was focusing on what delivers and ignoring the rest.
There are lots of social media networks out there, but each one is fickle in its own way.
Of course, it’s natural for you to want to post on all of them. After all, how can you possibly ignore a massive social media network?
Unless you have a social media team that is rather more than one person and/or are already investing a ton in social, trying to be everywhere is impossible. If you are, I doubt you’re reading this post.
The problem is each social media platform has its own style. If you try to cross-post, where one message gets shared verbatim across different networks, I’ll bet you the finest cup of coffee you can find that you will see little to no results.
So the next solution is to spend time to on each network to make it work, right? Well, that’s incredibly time consuming, especially if you’re talking about more than two or three networks.
So now we’re back to the initial problem of how do you do well on so many social media platforms?
The answer is you don’t. You determine which network(s) does two things and focus on that:
- Delivers traffic back to your site
- Easy/enjoyable to create
Most importantly, you want to spend your time on what is going to deliver revenue, traffic, or followership. Everything else is not worth your time.
When you’re starting out, your time is precious. Every hour of your time is something you can be doing to build your network. Spending time on a social media network that isn’t delivering is a waste of that precious time.
No matter how snazzy or exciting a network is in the world, if you aren’t seeing the needle move in a metric that matters to you, you’re wasting your time.
Of course, it is true you need to invest time before any social network could potentially pay off. So yes, dip your toe into the water and give them a try. But at some point, you will start to see if that thing you threw against the wall sticks.
I remember being so into Twitter and hating Facebook. Twitter was riding the hashtag high and Facebook felt as hip as posting on MySpace. So I wanted to crush it on Twitter and I spent minimal time focusing on Facebook.
Fast forward a few months and I noticed traffic coming back to me on Facebook while Twitter did nothing really.
So I swallowed my pride and doubled down on Facebook because it actually produced something.
The key is to determine early on your goals with social media, and watch those metrics to see what is working and what isn’t. Some networks are about building your personality, like Instagram or TickTock, while other networks drive traffic back, like Facebook or Pinterest.
In my experience, the networks that do the best may not be your personal favorite. Embrace what works and focus on that. Drop or limit your time on the rest until you have more resources for those.
Social media is fun and very exciting when you do it well, but focus your time early on to the social media that does something for moving you forward.