How to avoid wasting time on social media marketing

You can avoid wasting time on your social media marketing by doing the following:

1. Use only the channels you have the time and skills to maintain
2. Get an overview of the company’s social media profiles
3. Be conservative when assessing the resources required for maintenance
4. Close down redundant social media profiles
5. Focus on and evaluate your initiatives
6. Focus on creating real value for your followers

Social media is such a big part of our lives today that, for many businesses, it seems almost self-evident to have a presence on one or more social platforms.

However, it takes significant resources to maintain a presence on even just one of the many platforms—at least if you want that presence to create business value in the long term.

And you would have to be a scoundrel not to be interested in solid business value, wouldn’t you? 😉

Yes, you would!

In this guide, you will not get any “one size fits all” templates for either content planning or channel selection.

Instead, you will get the overview you need to assess whether organic social media is a relevant tactic for your company’s overall communication and marketing strategy.

That way, you avoid wasting time on random and ineffective social media marketing.

Check yourself before you wreck yourself

There are many examples of someone in a company impulsively deciding to create a profile on a social platform.

This often happens completely independently of the marketing department’s strategy or the company’s other long-term plans. And that is a shame, because in that case the social media presence easily develops into one of two things:

• Either it becomes a time sink and a source of stress that is far too often deprioritised or rushed through.
• Or the overview of the portfolio of social media profiles disappears.

The latter can easily damage the company’s brand, because a social media profile without activity is the virtual equivalent of a shop in a ghost town.

Cobwebs in the corners and dust on the shelves hardly signal that business is booming, do they?

That is why my most important advice to any company considering an organic presence on social media is: Check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Or put another way:

• Get an overview of the profiles that have already been created on behalf of your company
• Be conservative when assessing the resource requirements for social media management
• Close down redundant profiles, or make them completely maintenance-free
• Focus your social media presence and follow up on your initiatives

Start by considering the four basic phases I describe in this post.

Once you have gone through them, you will have a solid foundation for creating business value from your social media efforts—and you will avoid sabotaging your own company with ineffective pseudo-work on social media.

1. Get an overview of all active social media profiles

The surest way to get an overview of the company’s existing social media profiles is simply to review the most common platforms one by one.

In a Danish business context, you will get far by starting with an overview of the following platforms:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• YouTube
• Snapchat
• LinkedIn
• Twitter

But since you are at it, you might as well also check whether your company exists on smaller niche platforms such as Pinterest, Reddit, TikTok…

The latter really began to break through in Denmark during 2020, but at the time of writing we have yet to hear the truly great stories of Danish companies succeeding with an organic presence on TikTok.

2. Be conservative when assessing your social media resources

Be careful not to underestimate how much time and creative energy it takes to maintain a social media profile.

Sure, we can agree that it neither takes a PhD nor much effective working time to share an everyday photo here and there on Instagram—but if your social media presence is to create real business value for your company, you will typically need to approach the project far more strategically.

Note: The results above are an average that we found by analysing across customers, markets, and industries. Every case is different, and so will the numbers be.

3. Close down redundant social media profiles or put them into hibernation

Once you have identified the social media profiles you do not want to invest in going forward, you must decide whether to close them entirely. In some cases, that is the best solution. In other cases, it may make sense to spend a little time putting the profiles into a kind of virtual hibernation.

There are two important questions you need to ask yourself at this stage:

• Does my target audience expect my company to be present on this platform?
• Do I use this platform for advertising?

If the platform is an obvious place for a company in your industry, it is probably worth revisiting your assessment of whether you can find the resources to run an organic presence on the platform.

In this regard, note that a platform does not necessarily have strong business potential just because it is popular with users:

The vast majority of Danes, for example, have a Facebook profile, and 65% use it daily—but there is so much noise to compete with on Facebook that it can be an uphill battle to reach the target audience effectively with an organic presence.

Conversely, only 8% of Danes are active on LinkedIn daily—but because the platform is not yet as saturated with noise as Facebook, it is relatively easy to succeed with an organic effort on LinkedIn.

In addition, users on LinkedIn (unlike users on most other social platforms) are typically more positively inclined to interact with content from companies and organisations.

If you assess that a platform is completely irrelevant for reaching your target audience, the answer is obvious:

Close the profile. Ha, easy! And from now on, you can also put brand management on your CV.

(You can also choose a sensible middle ground if you are not ready to erase the profile from the history books: Put the profile into virtual hibernation by making a final post explaining to followers that they can follow your company going forward on the other social media platform(s) you decide to prioritise.)

Before you close a social media platform, it is worth considering whether you are currently advertising on the platform. If you are, it may be a good idea to prioritise a minimum of resources to maintain the profile so it appears active when visitors arrive via ads.

4. Focus on and evaluate your initiatives continuously

Once you have done the important groundwork and are left with a small portfolio of carefully selected social platforms (or perhaps even just a single platform), you are ready to begin defining and maintaining your organic presence on an ongoing basis.

Instead, we will maintain the strategic helicopter perspective and conclude with an introduction to which metrics you will benefit most from focusing on when evaluating your organic social media efforts. This depends entirely on your overall business objectives.

If your most important goal is to generate leads via a newsletter or drive traffic to your website, an organic social media presence is, for example, not particularly effective.

In such cases, it is better to invest in targeted paid advertising (which can, of course, take place on those very same platforms). Here, however, we focus only on the organic social media effort.

If, on the other hand, the goal is to increase awareness of your brand, there are several things you can measure to assess whether it is a success.

Followers

The number of followers on your social media profiles can be a good indicator of your brand’s development—but only if you pay close attention to what is driving the growth.

For example, it is easy to gain new followers if you use the invite function. But if you want to support and protect your brand, you need followers who are actively interested in and engage with the content you share.

And it does not help to invite your old evening ceramics class if your company makes a living building conveyor lines for the food industry.

A one-sided focus on follower growth is far too broad. It tells you nothing about whether your efforts create business value that supports your overall goals.

Reach

Put simply, the reach of a post tells you something about how far your content has spread after you hit “publish”.

Specifically, the number typically covers how many unique views your content has received—but it varies from platform to platform whether that number also tells you anything useful about how many people actually noticed the post (and did not just scroll past it in passing).

Reach is worth paying attention to because the algorithms on the various platforms are designed to carry the best content far and wide. And you cannot get around the algorithm, so make sure you get to know it.

In short, high reach is your receipt for having created an effective piece of content. But note that reach does not tell you whether your specific target audience responds positively to the content.

Views

Views are one of the numbers you should be careful not to be dazzled by. The reason is that it typically really covers how many times your content has been shown on a screen, but it tells you nothing about how many individual screens that represents—or whether anyone has actually seen and taken an interest in the content.

The view count also becomes automatically high if reach is high—so when possible, you should limit yourself to focusing on reach.

Engagement

If you want to support your brand as effectively as possible with your presence on social media, you have to do it on the platform’s terms.

In this regard, there is one decisive factor you must always keep in mind: Social media is, by definition, social.

It is the interactions between people that make all the difference. Without them, it is one-way communication—and that is not the product Mark Zuckerberg & Co. entered the market to offer.

So play along on the platforms’ own terms, and try to understand what role your company plays in the given social context.

If the company represents the serious, thoughtful type in the class, you should of course not share memes and funny cat videos. You should give followers something to think about—and there are many ways to do that, for example with in-depth opinion pieces, industry commentary, or analyses of current trends.

The short answer to the question of how to measure your organic social media presence is therefore this: Focus primarily on engagement, and secondarily on reach. And ignore the other numbers—they confuse more than they help.

The key to social media success: Create value for your audience

So! Now you are actually ready to go all in on the content planning that will support your organic social media effort—at least if, based on this guide, you have concluded that social media is relevant for your company.

Content management is a discipline in its own right within strategic communication and social media marketing, and it can be a large and complex task—especially if you are solely responsible for ideation, planning and coordination, producing text, graphics and video, as well as publishing and ongoing monitoring and evaluation.

But do not worry—you do not need to be able to juggle all the considerations at once. In fact, you only need to focus on one decisive thing when working with organic content for social media:

Every time you create a piece of social media content, try to put yourself in the recipient’s shoes and ask, “What’s in it for me?” before you hit the publish button.

If the answer to that question is a stunned “Nothing!”, your content is probably not very good. Consider whether it is possible to tweak the content by incorporating the recipient’s perspective:

• Version 1: “We have a new colleague. She is really great at SEO. We are really happy about that.”
• Version 2: “Our new colleague is really great at SEO, so from now on just get in touch when you have questions about search engine optimisation!”

You can see the difference, can’t you?

It is absolutely crucial that your audience gets some form of value from your content, so focus on that first and foremost.

The good news is that you can then breathe a sigh of relief and ignore the jungle of confusing and contradictory “best practice” tips and tricks that circulate in the industry:

• “If you are not using LinkedIn in your marketing?! Well then you might as well file for bankruptcy today!”
• “Remember to use video! Otherwise nobody will care about your content!”
• “Hashtags! Hashtaaaaags! HASHTAGS!”

…you can continue the list yourself 😜

All these types of social media tips and tricks are fine to know, but at best they can only strengthen your social media presence marginally.

If your content works, you can easily do without all sorts of great hacks—because then your efforts can stay afloat without extra help.

And if, on top of that, you take the important strategic considerations in this guide into account, you are well on your way to social media success. When you dare to focus on doing a few things well, you no longer need to waste time on ineffective social media efforts.

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Dennis Clement Jacobsen

Paid Social Specialist

[email protected]

+45 71 99 26 25