My Digital Story
I still can’t believe I lost three followers that day. Three whole followers, all of whom started to follow me last week when I posted that Hindi song. Could it be that I am losing followers because I posted a song in English? But my English songs have performed better historically. I just don’t get it….
This was me, two months back, struggling to understand why and how social media works the way it does. To this very day, the algorithms and concepts of social media perplex me. Researchers claim that posting at a certain time with a certain type of caption along with certain hashtags leads to that certainty an artist or budding influencer is looking for on social media. However, this is not always true. But you know what’s ironic? I am a marketing graduate… who took not one, not two, but THREE classes on social media and how it works. So I should be able to make it work, right? Am I a failure if I can’t?
I bet most of the people reading this might have also felt like failures because they couldn’t crack the algorithms. But I don’t blame you because social media was not, is not, and will never be a “only-one-method-for-success” platform. The possibilities existing within Social Media are extensive and innovative, and while they seem to be out-of-bounds for us common folk, these possibilities, by virtue of spelling and inherence, are most definitely possible. (unless you know you happen to be someone that has had magnitudes of success with social media, in which case KUDOS to you and do share your mantras in the comments along with the kind of business you have)
In order to make sure I can be the best at using and utilising social media for my whims, moods, and fantasies (and of course, business), I’m taking you guys on a journey to discover social media. As I mentioned above, social media offers different potential in forms and shapes for different individuals, and I’m determined to discover my success story. As far as I understand social media, the four C’s are what help you discover your social media story — content, creativity, constructivity, and consistency.
Obviously you have to have content to post otherwise…what are you even doing here? Identify what you are good at, and then narrow it down to what you are passionate about — that’s what makes for the best type of content.
Second, you gotta try to be as creative as possible. Creating something out of nothing is an acquired skill, so keep posting new ideas, songs, dances, or repurpose older ones with a new flavor. This will give your audiences something to look forward to (which is when they tend to click ‘follow’ or ‘subscribe’) as well as help you discover what your brand’s USP is or could be.
For example, I follow an Instagrammer who has the ‘throw a shoe in the air to change your costume’ challenge from TikTok as her brand’s USP. Her audiences constantly engage with her to ask for various takes on the same challenge, and she recently got verified on Instagram due to her sudden growth in popularity as she took on this challenge. All this success — just because she tried to be creative to spice up the challenge. However, take it from a certified creative creature like myself (I mean, I have it on my resume and all), you could be the MOST creative person on the planet and yet not be able to get the results you want.
This is where the third C comes in — constructivity. A self-made word, constructivity is when one can extract the most benefits out of whatever you’re exracting from. In this case, constructivity within social media would be to actually look at use-cases around you. If there’s a business, individual, group of individuals, fan-page, interest-page (you get the point) that is active on social media and successfully gaining followers posting the type of content you want to post, use their success stories, methods, ways, and even times of promotion. However, please use their ideas to engage and reach instead of their content, otherwise you’re lowkey looking at plagiarism, copyrights — all that fancy stuff you’d rather avoid.
Finally, the MOST important C would be consistency. Consistency, or rather, the lack of it, has been my downfall over the years — I get tired of posting because I expect results too soon. Just be patient and, despite how demotivating and painstaking this might be, keep posting. Have faith in yourself, your content, and the quality of what you’re posting.
Now that we have my collegiate knowledge about social media out of the way, let’s get back to real talk. As I mentioned, the four C’s will help but you gotta find your own way (as the Joe Jonas song plays in my head) to social success.
To create my own success story, I’m currently doing A/B testing for my business (and soon for my personal social media profiles as well). For all those who don’t know, A/B testing is when you follow the four C’s and post consistency each day of the week but at random times, or with random taglines. For instance, I would post on Monday of the first week at 9AM, then Monday of the second week at 11 AM,… and so on and so forth until I have an idea of how my posts perform at various times. Moving forward, this would help me understand the best time specific to my brand to reach my audiences and post on different social media platforms.
Conducting A/B testing can be extremely helpful when it comes to cross-platform posting, since what works for you on Facebook might not on Instagram, and vice-versa. Therefore, discovering what works best will help you streamline your efforts into perfecting your four C’s moving forward. You can also use A/B testing to try out different taglines or captions to see what words work best together to attract more engagement and impressions.
Now, I know I’ve left a lot unsaid with how each of these individual platforms work. On top of that, I spoke about ‘engagement and impressions’ and all this foreign jargon that might confound and puzzle many of you. But I promise I’ll be back next week to elaborate on all this and much more! While implementing A/B testing over the next four weeks, I’ll be continuing my Digital Story with more information about social media, the key terms to understanding social media traffic, the ‘know-hows’ to posting on different social platforms as well as my real-time results on implementations of various methods, tricks and tips.
Do feel free to share your tricks and tips with me to implement on my social media as well as your opinions on this blog! Super excited to share my Digital Story with all of you :)
Photos from Pexels