How to make relevant social content

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Good morning!

Welcome to Social Studies.

Here’s the agenda for this week:

• brought to you by Motion

• how to make relevant content

• creators I like

• want to work together?

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HOW TO BE RELEVANT

Last week I made the case that when it comes to marketing on social media, relevance is all that matters.

12 people apparently disagreed and unsubscribed, but hopefully I convinced the rest of you. 😎 

So… how do we make content that is relevant to our audience?

Know Your Audience

Remember… relevance is meeting the needs of your audience, in the moment they need it most. (Shoutout to my friend Dave Adamson for that quote.)

You can use a tool for this (SparkToro is a great option) or you can just start snooping like a jealous ex.

Look at who is following your competitors and pay attention to:

• What does your audience talk about? 🙊 

• Who does your audience listen to? 🙉 

• How does your audience see themselves? 🙈 

  • Words in their profile are an underrated source of information.

Add Value

My friend Jake Bjorseth has this incredible analogy.

He makes the case that so many brands start with “What do we have?” and then pivot to “How can we make it work on social?”

A much more effective tactic would be, “What is working really well on social?” and then backing into, “What can we create that would work in that setting?”

The example Jake uses is coffee shops.

The average marketer at a coffee shop thinks something like, “I need to make social content…. let’s see… I can do BTS roasting videos, I can make a graphic for National Coffee Day, latte art videos will probably crush…”

What happens? Every coffee shop’s Instagram feed looks the exact same.

The solution? Here’s what Jake says…

Test More

My friend Taylor recently posted this banger.

In the thread, he walks through how he scaled Animalhouse Fitness from 0 to over $14 million with Facebook Ads.

He posted 3 different creatives and asked marketers to guess which one performed the best.

94% of people got it wrong. Only 6% actually knew what the audience wanted.

Moral of the story… it doesn’t matter if you like the content. It doesn’t matter if your boss likes the content. It only matters if your audience likes the content.

You’ll never find out what your audience actually likes unless you are continually testing new types of content.

Bonus tip: When people are scrolling the feed, the don’t care how much money you spent on a piece of content and they really don’t care if the content is on brand.

tldr;

• Know your audience

• Add value

• Test more

CREATORS I LIKE

I messed up last Friday and accidently included the same poll question twice. Whoops. Here’s what the second question was supposed to be:

WORK TOGETHER?

• I like helping cool brands and creators scale using social (and leveraging my audience when it’s a good fit). Reply to this email to start the conversation.

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