Keeping up with various social media outlets is a lot of work. You need high quality images, timely information, personality, and time to interact with other users after planning all of that wonderful content. For many organizations, this is overwhelming. So instead of putting 100 percent effort into creating content, building a community, and interacting with users, there are a lot of half-hearted attempts made to cover the organization’s social media bases—including hasty posts, spelling errors, and low-quality images (just to name a few.)
The problem: Your audience has an excellent sense for detecting when you’re not trying very hard. The results are sloppy—and make for a bad reflection of your organization. Think of it like when you’re baking: if you don’t measure your ingredients and rush through the cooking process, the results are never good…and probably inedible. The same holds true for online content. When you don’t follow the recipe and respect the science behind it, the end product is poor.
So what do you do when you’re limited by staff resources, time, and aren’t really sure what qualifies as “quality content” in the first place?
For one, this is where a business like Lumen (that’s us!) can help by providing support services. By contracting out your online presence, you can count on consistent quality content that’s relevant, interesting, and engaging. It’s less risk than hiring a full-time staff person and is backed by tested strategies that produce results. Our passion is storytelling and building a community that supports businesses they believe in. You can learn more about what we do here.
But what if you can’t hire out support services and still want to have a solid social media presence? Our advice: stick to a few social media outlets you know your target audience is using and focus on quality over quantity. It may take more time to build a following, but if you can provide a few well-thought out and well-executed posts each month, it’s better than spending a lot of time producing low-quality content. If you build it, they will come.