The digital age has provided users access to a wealth of knowledge that has never been so readily available. The key is not to simply use social media platforms for your business, it’s to use them purposefully.
Facebook hit its 13th birthday on Feb. 4, which is an incredibly long stint for many websites, let alone a social media platform. This timeframe makes it possible for some members of Gen Z to have actually been born into Facebook, with an account created by a parent or older sibling when they were an infant. When we start to break down the usage of social media platforms by age, it’s overwhelmingly the case that the younger demographic opts for Snapchat or Instagram instead of their parent’s choice of Facebook.
There could be a few explanations for this. First, they could be gravitating towards newer platforms because their parents are not on them. However, I believe that this choice goes farther than surveillance; it's also a break from information overload.
The trend for emerging social platforms is simplicity. The fewer features an application has, the more popularity it has with the millennial demographic.
Thirteen long years of Facebook means that a simple networking platform was forced to rethink and add features over time to stay relevant. This resulted in a hodgepodge of over complicated features, re-designs, and organizational methods that negated the allure of the platform in the first place: entertainment.
Snapchat is incredibly popular right now for a number of reasons:
- It’s relatively new, which means less content to sort through.
- Advertisements are kept to a minimum.
- If businesses want to advertise, their content must be as visually exciting as user-generated content.
If we apply this logic to other social platforms, we get concise, targeted content, and a strategy for developing content in other platforms:
- Don’t overload your audience. Posting daily on platforms like Facebook or Instagram can clog up the feeds of your viewers, causing them to unlike or unfollow you. Post less content and boost your posts more frequently.
- Don’t constantly advertise to your viewers. They get it! You sell a product or a service. Cater to them by posting content that they would be interested in viewing, such as FLUFF articles (friendly light-hearted user-friendly features).
- If you are going to advertise, make it appealing, on brand and interesting. Try making a reference to a pop culture event or personality.
Although social media has evolved into a marketplace of sorts, it’s important to be aware of its roots. Social platforms were created for users to recreationally connect with old friends, to secure new friendships, to network with old colleagues, and to rekindle old romances. The human component of these interactions will never be removed from social networking, no matter now commercialized particular platforms become. This means that content that appeals to our nature will always be relevant.
Aim to create content for a business that someone would be willing to share with someone else because it is funny, relevant to a particular demographic (millennial humor, '90s throwbacks, etc.) or because it causes users to like, comment or answer a question. Content needs to be engaging, and if your strategy starts with that, you are on the right track.
