An essential concept for any community manager, or any business trying to get the most from social media, is to understand is the 80 20 rule. Social media is different when it comes to selling. You have to constantly keep an audience entertained, engaged and informed. In-between that you also have should be selling your brand.
80 20 rule
The 80 20 rule of social media community management allows you to keep the right balance of content to keep your social media out posts interesting and follow worthy. The content you share should be useful to your followers, this will give them a reason to continue following you and if the content is really good it will cause them to share it or recommend following your social media accounts to a friend.
The 80 20 rule also helps you in writing your weekly / monthly content plan. You should be using colour coding to make sure you have the right balance in your messaging.
- 80% of the content shared needs to be useful, engaging and shareable.
- 20% of the content shared should be sales generating
This is important in communities on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. With Linkedin you can be more direct, people are less offended by direct selling on there provided it is targeted correctly.
80% content will look like;
- Recognising excellent photography (simply sharing great images with a nice comment)
- Sharing links to great photography resources (tips, help, advice, when you cant always blog its good to share the love)
- Links to time management articles (aligning yourself with time efficiency)
- Blogs
- Tutorial Videos
The idea of 80% content is to give people a reason to continue to follow your social media posts. Imagine you are in a conversation with someone, if all they ever did was talk about themselves and how great they were, you probably wouldn’t stay in that conversation very long.
Pick content aligns with your brand message, use them to fuel your 80% content
80% content needs to help people understand broader concepts around your brand. They should be clearly defined and fit with your brand tone of voice. For example just because a sports event is trending, or a particular celebrity is having a baby, it doesn’t mean you have to start tweeting about it.
20% content will look like;
- Sharing a promo video
- Talking about features and benefits “Did you know with (insert product) you get X Y Z benefit …….”
- Sharing promotions “10% off this week”
- Feature videos inside the software (see future steps)
- Blogs
It’s OK to talk about how good you are. You should be doing this in as many creative ways as possible. From something as simple as a tweet about a particular feature of your product or service to full blown collaboration with industry influencers and wider marketing campaigns.
It is important that you are consistently (but gently) trying to funnel people into becoming customers. Your 20% content should also be visual, engaging, shareable and not just plain, BUY ME messaging.
Some content straddles both 80% and 20%
This is where the magic happens. Competitions could be argued that they are they are 80% content in that they are fun and give people a reason to follow you. It could also be argued that it is 20% content if the prize is one of your products. If done correctly you can really highlight a new product in a fun, interesting and shareable way that gets people talking about your product.
Main Tips To Remember About The 80 20 Rule
- Do your best to stick to the ratio
- Make sure you colour code your content plan to give you a quick visual appraisal of balance
- Try to create cross over content that could fall into either 80 or 20
