Here's My Grand Strategy with Social Media
One of the impacts of going out on the road teaching a class on Social Media Marketing is I start learning a thing or two about it, and it’s hard to drive in a topic without eventually feeling a need to apply it to my personal life. While I’ve applied it professionally to businesses I’ve worked with, the honest truth is I really only care about number one, and if I can’t make my own online presence amazing, what good am I? For now, I fall back on my 100,000 youtube views to give myself some sense of self validation, but I know I can do better.
Besides, I’m sick of just being known as the Photoshop guy.
It took me about 30 times of teaching the class on Social Media for the lessons to actually sink in. I’m starting to get it. Having the strategy is the easy part - it’s implementing it that’s hard.
So here’s my strategy:
Step 1. Have a Good Landing Page
I start the class by saying, “Social Media is useless without a good landing page.”
I spent three 12 hour days last week remaking my site, so check to that.
(Note: I don’t have a clear call to action yet, but that will change in time when I add a large subscribe link.)
Step 2. Have a Goal
By this, I don’t mean getting a lot of followers on twitter. That’s a bullshit goal. I mean what’s the hard take away end point? For some that’s selling a piece of software or a health insurance plan. For me, it’s working as a full time writer.
Step 3. Have a Small Target
I’m stumbling a bit in this step, knowing targeting myself to anyone who hires writers is a sucker’s game. How do I make that target smaller? The obvious first question is what sort of writer? If I’m to be completely honest, I’d love to be a sitcom writer. There. I said it. I’m not even embarassed.
But getting that job is incredibly difficult and many people waste their lives chasing it.
I’ll try all the main channels - spec scripts, contests, befriending the right people, making video shorts, etc, but I’m also going to try getting in through the back door. I’d be perfect to do the social media for a network show with my current skillset. I say that without a moment’s hesitation.
That means the target is the people currently working on those network’s marketing campaigns.
Step 4. Make that Target Smaller
In theory, this target is no more than a 100 people - one point person for each potential show worth working on. I’ll spend a future post on chasing down the list of names.
Step 5. Give this Target Something they Want
This target is looking for entertaining content creators who can regularly produce, and knows how to grow an audience. Which means proving to them I can give them a large audience by way of showing I can give myself one. In other words, getting numbers is what matters. This seems to be getting rather meta. The big take away here is growing out my own audience to prove that it’s something I’m capable of.
Step 6. Monitor Results. Change Steps 4 & 5 if it’s not working
Even before starting, I can tell this initial plan is doomed to failure, as I can’t legitimately give anything of value to my initial target. Did you read Step 5? Total bullshit. I sat on this, wondering who I could give something useful to. Something that’s better than anything else of it’s kind on the web. Blogs on social media marketing have been done to death, as have videos and infographics. There’s a hundred case studies waiting out there and if books are added to the mix, the competition gets even steeper.
So I’ll end this post on the uplifting note that the current strategy is doomed before it even begins.
In the next post I’ll refocus the target to two specific groups that actually might care what I have to say - friends and former students.
I’d love to know if people who attended my seminar are going through the steps as analytically as I am, and in the comment section, please tell me what you’re doing for the five steps.
- Link to your landing page
- Your goal
- Who is your target?
- Is there potentially a smaller target?
- What can you give them?