Eggs in a Basket

In my undergrad finance class, I will always remember my professor saying, “don’t put all your eggs in the same basket.”  He was of course talking about financial investments such as stock, however, I feel it applies in many ways throughout the business and marketing world.  I do not believe a company should put all of its eggs in the basket of one social media platform.  The social media world changes so fast, it is hard to determine which platform is going to work the best tomorrow, next week, or next year.  There are platforms that a company can pay more attention to at certain times because it is bringing in better results, but they shouldn’t completely cut out other platforms because they do not perform as well at that time. 

In the case of Amy Sine Photography LLC, the social platforms used are Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter.  The company was started exclusively on Facebook and eventually branched out to Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and lastly YouTube.  In the beginning Facebook worked best because I knew more people who used it, currently I am almost at 9k followers.  As organic engagement started to slow down, I started working on other platforms.  Pinterest only recently began attracting new pinners to my board.  I have a little over 1k followers on Instagram and a little over 100 on Twitter.  Currently I am using Hootesuite software to post to all platforms at once.  There are some shortcomings to it, however, the most useful aspect is how you can choose to have the platform auto schedule content.  This allows the platform to analyze when your audience is online for each social media account and post at those times.

The type of platform a company should use is dependent on what type of company they are.  If you are a more visual type of company such as a photography business; Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube can be all utilized successfully.  If you are a company that deals more in data analysis or situations where images can’t really be used, LinkedIn or YouTube would be best.  On YouTube you can talk to the audience to explain concepts, strategies, or give information in general.

When determining which platforms should receive more time allocation than others, you should consider how much content you can use for each of your platforms.  If the information is relevant and compatible with another platform, you can use that content in multiple places.  Times this wouldn’t work would be albums of images posted to Twitter, full size videos posted to Instagram, live posts created at the same time over multiple platforms, etc.  Blog posts can be shared on all media, one or more images, marketing promotion boards, short video clips, etc.  You can also reuse content or move it around and post one piece of content on one platform this week and then post it to another platform the next.  This takes the burden off of creating new content constantly, so you can focus on creating and perfecting new content that will be used later.

A key term I keep referring to is content.  I’ve heard over and over again that content is king.  I believe that people will respond more to content that keeps their interest.  In a study by Southern California Public Radio, it has been determined that as of 2013 humans have an attention span of eight seconds which is one second less than a goldfish. (2015) If you do not grasp your target audience’s attention quickly, you will lose them to the barrage of other content they are surfing.  Not only do you compete with other content in the platform itself but messaging, texts, emails, etc. also distract the people you are trying to reach.

When determining which platforms should receive funds for paid advertisements, the type of content the business is posting should be considered.  The viewers of each platform are similar and different at the same time.  If I am posting an event for Valentine’s Day mini sessions for children, LinkedIn would probably not be a good place to post this or even boost it.  The flip side to this is, even those on LinkedIn have children and organic reach is better on LinkedIn because it a smaller network compared to Twitter or Facebook. 

My marketing fund strategy is to set a budget for the week or month and post different forms of content to see which piece takes hold and gains engagement quickly.  Once I identify pieces that are gaining organic traction, I will boost those posts with specific audiences to gain more relevant views.  This may mean that one-week Facebook gets more funds and the next week Pinterest gets more.  Social media changes so quickly that it is impossible to know exactly how much to place in each media platform until some content testing has been performed to determine engagement.

Content to boost would be anything that receives interaction quickly.  Once the organic reach starts to wane, you can boost these posts to continue bringing in additional viewers.  Most often this would be an engaging photo, an informative video, or an eye catching live video.  Live videos on Facebook get more engagement if they are 10 minutes long or longer.  The more time you stay engaged, the more time people have to find you and your content.  Additional content to boost right away would be exclusive offers with an eye-catching photo or video or anything that leads to an external site such as your website. 

With the new announcement by Mark Zuckerberg about the changes that will be taking place in Facebook, content will now be second to conversations.  Marketers will need to begin connecting with their audiences in ways that get them talking and interacting with other commenters.  One way to do this is asking questions during a live video that prompts the viewer to answer or discuss.  An example of this would be to create a live video on how to use your cell phone to take better photos.  During the video, ask watchers if they have any questions or anything they would like to see or know more about.  This gives the viewer an open-ended question rather than one they can simply just say yes or no to.   

Where before content alone was king, now I believe we are shifting to conversations are king.  The two concepts go hand in hand, if you don’t create content that viewers/readers can relate to and are interested in, how do you create conversations?

Works Cited:

Southern California Public Radio. (2015). Attention Spans – Consumer Insights Microsoft Canada. Retrieved from https://www.scribd.com/document/265348695/Microsoft-Attention-Spans-Research-Report.