Why we are reducing our social media reach
As a business, you know the challenges of managing an array of social media channels to maintain an active and engaging online presence. It’s relentless right?
Whilst we know social media can be a powerful tool for visibility and engagement, is every single channel right for your brand? Have you considered that streamlining your digital presence may actually help you to achieve better results?
As you know, it is imperative to always be analysing our marketing activity and what’s more, utilising those results to create actions, not just statements. As the old cliche goes, if you are standing still in this industry, you my friend, are heading backwards!
At Nutshell, we operated across the traditional ‘BIG 4’ social media channels; LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X. When reviewing our channels’ KPIs over the last 12 months, we noticed that we had gained less friends on Facebook than Elon Musk did on his first day at Twitter! And talking of Twitter/X, our total followers there actually shrunk over the year.
What’s that I hear you cry? It’s not all about followers. Well tell that to the guy at the front of the conga line. But no seriously, you are in fact correct, it is not all about followers, so next we jumped in to a review of the post engagements. To put into context how poorly these channels had performed, Facebook and Twitter/X had gained less than 3% of engagements compared to LinkedIn and Instagram. And as for impressions, we are talking less than 1%!
TLDR? Nobody cared about what we had to say on Facebook and Twitter/X.
Right, now that we identified that, what can we do to improve?
Well for starters, we remove those channels. They are not environments where we are likely to find our core target audience, neither our secondary target audience, heck even third! So, let’s stop screaming into an empty room and concentrate on where we will be heard, and more importantly, liked.
By reducing our channels, we can apply more resource into tailoring our content to the specific channel it is published on. For example, more reels and stories on Instagram, or more thought leadership, longer-form content on LinkedIn.
Reducing our channels also gives us more clarity on strategising our content to deliver what our preferred audience will resonate with more. In an ideal world, you want to create the highest quality content you can for the most relevant followers you have, whilst attracting lookalikes along the way!
Time for some hypocrisy…
It also gives you time to try out NEW channels! The resource that has been released from streamlining our previous set of channels means that we can now experiment with new, shiny channels and content. Out with the old, in with the new!
TikTok and YouTube are spaces we have been flirting with for a while, but now we are planning on making it official. As before, this will be tested, analysed and actioned in the same vein to make sure they are resonating with the right audiences once activity begins.
So, key takeaways:
- First and foremost, it is important to always analyse and ACTION all your marketing activity
- Don’t spread yourself thinner than that last teaspoon of Nutella on your granary toast – it is better to be more active, engaging and relevant on less channels, than boring, irrelevant and ‘throw-away’ on absolutely everywhere
- Know your core audience and learn where they hang out. Go there, be relevant but be authentic
- You’re not ditching social media, or slowing down on your activity, just finding a better way to say what you want to say
If you get stuck, we are always here to help, we offer end-to-end social media management, including creative, content and strategy. Or if you are just looking for a bit of consultation, we are happy to advise. It all starts with a hello@nutshellcreative.co.uk