Am I Posting Enough?
In this article, we focus on our motto – quality over quantity – to answer the question “am I posting enough?” Find out if your business is doing it right and tips for improving your current strategy.
Anyone looking to influence others to buy something or believe in them and their business knows they must have a social media presence to be relevant today. According to December 2021 HubSpot data, social media marketing was the top digital marketing channel used by businesses to reach their audience beating out websites, blogs, email, and influencer strategies.
But are you doing it right? It’s one of the first questions we hear from prospective clients at Fifteen Marketing – “am I posting enough?”
Let’s break this question into three parts:
1. Are you posting enough of the right content?
2. How are you measuring your posts’ performance?
3. Are you getting the results you want?
Social media “experts” often use sales tactics that say what you’re doing isn’t enough. Often, they want you to think social media requires hours and hours to be done well. As a busy business owner, you're probably thinking "well, I definitely don't have time for that!"
I’m happy to tell you that there’s strategic marketing – working smarter not harder – and then there’s just doing more, potentially wasting money or putting yourself at risk of burning out.
Algorithms will always favor original, quality content that your audience is organically engaging with.
I recently had a prospective client say, “During my evaluation of choosing a marketing company to work with, one of them shared the magic formula for social media.”
I was intrigued! She then rattled off that their strategy was to post 8 times per day on Instagram, 4 carefully timed posts on Facebook, and some other part of the formula that would magically make her marketing goals come true. It’s true that consistency is important when posting, and it’s also true social media algorithms are ever-evolving, but I assure you THERE IS NO MAGIC FORMULA TO BEAT THE BOTS.
We stand firmly on the belief that no matter how the algorithms evolve or which platform/s fits your brand the best, algorithms will always favor original, quality content that your audience is organically engaging with.
A business owner friend of mine once shared something that I believe resonates with the strategy we use at Fifteen Marketing as our guiding principle:
Imagine if your favorite author or artist only put out a new book or new album every couple of years. Does that diminish your love of their work or your admiration of their talent, or does it make you look forward to the next thing they release and appreciate the time and quality that went into it knowing it was their best product?
Like I said above, but I think it’s worth repeating, trying to beat algorithms is not necessary because they’re designed to prioritize and push original content that your audience is engaging with.
Here are a couple of my professional tips to guide you through those three questions I mentioned at the beginning.
Consistency will rank better than a roller coaster strategy, but you don’t have to go crazy creating mediocre content.
To get engagement, you are better off posting good content once or twice a week than going all in and pushing a bunch of quality content just because you hit a creative streak, or doing nothing at all because you don’t have the time.
Instead, schedule your content so that even when you’re busy with other parts of your business, your content can still be on autopilot.
Alternatively, you can hire a social media manager or outside partner to help you create content depending on your budget, writing and design strengths, and creative likes or dislikes, but before you do so, make sure to go into the conversation with key questions to evaluate how their strategy plugs into your business goals.
To outsource or DIY? Use the three questions at the beginning to serve as your "North Star" should you consider outsourcing your social media. There are a lot of great partners out there who can help you grow your business, but you need the right partner in your corner with a sound strategy as to how they will help you achieve your business goals.
For example, I have a client who enjoys social media and does a really good job at it, however, she dislikes long-form writing and partners with me for her blog posts. Her social media efforts take care of the day-to-day marketing for her business and are the perfect fit for her to engage in real-time with her audience. I, in turn, spend the focused time creating bi-monthly blog posts (which she hated writing) that help drive traffic to her site, gain subscribers, provide her with content to leverage across her other marketing channels, and improve her SEO strategy. It’s a win/win!
Are you posting content your audience wants?
Take inventory of the types of content you create. Start by writing down or using an excel spreadsheet to look at your activity across channels (social media, blog, email, etc.), platforms (Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.), and the type of content you’re pushing (original, re-shares, written articles, video, infographics, etc.).
Look at this breakdown to see where you’re focusing the majority of your efforts and help identify areas where there could be opportunities to test something else.
Testing content is a great way to evaluate what resonates best with your audience. You don't have to waste time reinventing the wheel to test different formats. Try using one or two pieces of high-quality content and repurpose it across a couple of different formats or mediums.
Get on our waitlist for our FREE guide Testing Content on Instagram
For example, take a blog post and try breaking it up and delivering the content via short video clips or compile your top content for a month and put it into a newsletter. For visual learners, abbreviate some of your top tips or products and put them into an infographic. We especially love a beautifully animated post to grab phone scrollers’ attention!
It’s hard to know what your audience wants if you don’t try different things. You might be surprised what they want and what you enjoy creating!
Are you getting the results you want?
Set your objectives. You have to start with clear, measurable objectives for your marketing efforts. Are you simply raising brand awareness or is there an action you want your audience to take? Above-average performing posts will always have a call-to-action, but you have to be clear on what you want from your efforts.
Try, try again. Don’t think of under-performing content as a failure, think of it as an opportunity to improve. Before labeling your content as a failure, try releasing it again in a couple of weeks in another format, with a different title to position the content as the solution to the problem your audience has, or push it on a different channel to see if anything changes.
Lessons learned. Try this approach of testing one or two different formats of content and pushing a little bit more on a channel that you use a little less often. Once you have a couple of weeks of data, you should be able to look at your audience’s behavior and decide if the objectives you originally established were met.
Most importantly, always lead your social marketing efforts with quality content. Quality content that excites and engages your audience will prove more enjoyable for you or your team to create and more fruitful for your growing business.
Happy creating!
Andrea