Social media can be real crap shoot for brands and business. What content will resonate most with your audience? Which platforms will work best for your brands? All those questions will likely lead you to one solution: trial and error. Experimenting. Testing.
Along the way, you’re bound to make some mistakes, and that’s okay. Even certified leaders in the marketing world have their hits and misses. Below we have a few from HubSpot.
They documented 5 things they learned from their past year of experimentation (which primarily focuses on Facebook). If you want to shift your own social media strategy, we suggest taking a look at these to avoid any setbacks.
- The most important factor on Facebook is still your audience. Facebook is a discovery model platform. Its primary goal is to make the audience happy. So you’ll only get ROI if you create quality content for your audience.
- Live or die by the first three seconds. Focus on telling your entire story in three seconds, and then retelling it with more detail throughout the rest of the video. “The better we became at optimizing the first three seconds, the more our average watch time increased.”
- People just want to be seen and included. Naturally, people are vocal in communities they find relatable. They want to feel included and seen in content that relates to them.
- Topical is key. Facebook and its viewers want to see content that is most relevant in that time and place. Make sure you understand that news, cultural events, and holidays can have an impact on whether or not your video performs well. When evaluating your video’s performance, keep this in mind.
- Native is better than non-native. Facebook as a platform, and its audience clearly favors native video content. A native video from HubSpot was viewed almost 160x more than the non-native link.
The biggest lesson here? Dig deeeeeep to understand your audience. Where they live, which cultural events do they follow, which content format they prefer, etc. Check out more insights below.
