Facebook = everything gets culled

Here I was thinking that doing some Facebook posts for a company would be easy. Here I was thinking this would be a quick task, something I could breeze through. After all, I see them on a daily basis posted by the companies and organisations I follow. I occasionally update my own Facebook status - this should really be too easy. WRONG. This is not easy; this is a time consuming and meticulous job that makes you look like a slacker because you have Facebook open on your web browser. I had no idea the time and effort that went into just drafting a Facebook post. This probably sounds ridiculous, but you jump through quite a few hoops to have a potential post maybe published.

Your client

First of all, you must consider the client you are writing for. Which probably seems obvious but that means you need to understand you client. You need to consider what they would find appropriate. You must make sure you aren’t doubling up on posts because that is repetitive and their audience will get bored.

Target Audience

This brings me to their target audience. When you are creating the posts, you need to think about how the client wants to be positioned, and you need to think about what the consumer would find interesting, informative, or fun – what ever it is that you’re going for. After all, we are fighting for that little bit of attention from the same groups of people within our market segment. We need something that will stop the client or potential client in their tracks, and get them to like/share/follow us.

Keep it interesting

Which brings me to interesting posts. Go and find something interesting. When you are posting on behalf of the same clients week after week, it gets tough to find new and interesting things, I can promise you this. I found myself searching for hours, digging through news articles, “why you should” articles, fascinating or thought provoking images. When I was at a loss I’d see what the competition was doing, and try to do one better, yet stay ahead of the game. 

Everything gets culled

Then after everything, you put your research together, present it with some catchy titles and submit it to your editor/marketing manager (whoever). They go through what you’ve done, cull half of it, knowing exactly what the client is looking for, and you’ll find some of your hard work is posted. Don’t even bother looking at the number of likes you get, because then you might never want to do it again, except for the times you get a few hundred likes, that’s always rewarding. 

It’s a crazy world, the social media world. We scroll past these posts on Facebook or Instagram like they’re nothing at all. What we don’t consider is that poor intern who researched all of that information for us. We look it over in two seconds if it has a nice picture, and go on with our days and forget about it. Hard world isn’t it? It makes me question the effectiveness of social media, but for some organisations it really works. We just all seem to be fighting for the attention of consumers, and they just really don’t seem to care. There is so much to choose from, so why would they?