6 Reasons Why You’re Not Growing on Social Media
As social media is getting more saturated, refining your content is more important than ever. There’s a lot of advice circulating on "How To Grow Your Social Media”, from self-proclaimed gurus with little to no experience other than growing their own accounts, teaching people how to grow. So here’s a blog post that cuts through all the BS, giving you 6 real reasons why you’re not growing, based on the content we see ‘flop’ all the time.
You’re Not Structuring Your Videos
Talking videos are top-performing on TikTok and they’re making their way on Instagram. The struggle with these is that it’s your job to get people to listen to you. While the 0.5 seconds of your video are vital in hooking users’ attention (which we expanded on in our previous blog post), the rest of the video is just as important to get people to stick around and listen to what you have to say, until the very end. You do this by structuring your videos, so that they have a clear beginning, middle and end. The beginning hooks them in, the middle delivers the main point while the end wraps it up and makes sense of it. Just like an essay!
You’re Not Focusing on SEO
Social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok are search engines. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), meaning that they operate on keywords. The algorithm figures out what users are interested in by scanning their behaviour around the content they consume, including, how long they watch videos for, what they engage with and what they search. The algorithm decifers what type of content each user is interested in, by observing their behaviours, informed by KEYWORDS.
Your job is to inform the algorithm of what your content is about so that it can filter your content accordingly, and then show it to those who are interested in the keywords you have included in your content. How do you do this? Include keywords from your video and add as (1) text on your video (making sure it’s native to each respective platform), (2) in your closed captions, (3) in your caption and (4) in your hashtags.
You’re Keyword Stuffing
While we’re on the topic of keywords and SEO — we see many creators take the advice, like we gave above, and over-crowd their keywords, thinking that as they add more keywords, they are reaching more people. This couldn’t be further from the truth, and this is an illegitimate SEO practice, called keyword stuffing. Surprisingly, we see many self-proclaimed social media experts share advice like this, thinking it “hacks” the algorithm. By adding more keywords, you are (1) potentially flagging your video as spam and (2) you are actually confusing the algorithm.
Going back to what was said above about “the algorithm being informed on user behaviour through keywords” — by overloading it, you are not telling it clearly what your video is about. By keeping it simple and adding the keywords that your video is about, you are allowing the algorithm to do its job successfully, which in turn means your video performs better.
You’re Not Trial & Error-ing
One of the biggest things holding creators back (and we’re ALL guilty of this…including us), is posting content, seeing it ‘flop’ with low engagement and low views, and then giving up because of the discouragement. We get it — seeing low views can be extremely frustrating, especially when you feel like you’re sharing so much value; however, it doesn’t mean you’re failing! It means that it’s time to trial & error. Any creator, of any size, can go through a phase like this.
Creators with 100’s of thousands of followers may experience a sudden drop in engagement, to which they have to go through the trial & error process again. So don’t be fooled to think this is something you only do once. If you are dedicated to growing a brand on social media, it might be something you do multiple times! The bottom line is — you’ve got to get good at testing out different formats of content. P.S. This doesn’t mean you need to have a billion content ideas to test out. You can test out the same content idea MULTIPLE times. Research what content is performing best with creators or brands in your industry and get trial & error-ing until you figure out what ‘lands’ with your audience.
You’re Consuming More Than You Create
Sounds cliché, but it’s so true. The best way to stand out from the crowd and leave an impact in our industry is by being innovative and unique — sharing something NEW. When you scroll to get content ideas, you unconsciously sing the same song as everyone else; however, when you are able to draw content ideas from your life, your work, your clients, experiences, customer feedback, and team or staff dynamics — that is when you create unique and innovative content that ADDS to the general online space.
Your Content Just Isn’t Good.
Put bluntly, your content just might not be good. And we’re not saying this as a be-all end-all, because the good news is that anyone and everyone can improve their content. Take a critical look at your content from the perspective of your general consumer and try to evaluate if YOU would watch this video. If you want an unbiased opinion, our super affordable Audit service allows us to do this for you through a pre-recorded video personalised for you.
Think about the following when evaluating if your content is up to standard…
Video Quality: Is your video blurry, or low-quality? Are you filming with the most natural lighting available, or a ring light? Are you using any filters that might lower the video quality?
Talking-Video Structure: Are you structuring your videos clearly, with a beginning, middle and end so your audience can listen attentively until the end?
Video Edits: Are you removing your pauses at the beginning and throughout your video?
Hooks: Are you using Text, Speech and Subliminal hooks in all your videos? Read our previous blog post to learn what each is, with examples.
Contents: Are you just saying the same thing as everyone else, or are you adding more value?
SUMMARY
If you are doing all of these things well, as described, this might mean you have to take a deeper look at your overarching social media strategy — to identify where you want to position yourself in the online space, how you want to brand yourself, who your target audience is, what content they consume and more. You’ve got to lay the right foundations before moving on to tweaking the details like the above. P.S. We also have a service that allows us to create a strategy for you as a 1-off service, which you can enquire about here.
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