Last night, Waterman Business Centre’s hub of vibrant co-working entrepreneurs were replaced with ambitious working women ready to mingle and get down with social media over a glass or two of rosé. These women were Business Chicks Premium members and they were gathered for the Facebook Community Boost Powered By Business Chicks.
The interactive workshop was broken into two modules, ‘Getting Creative with Your Mobile’ and ‘Grow You Business (Ads) with Facebook’ all hosted by social media trainer, consultant and all-round business whiz Heather Porter.
These sessions were accompanied with plenty of snacks and glasses of booze to really get the creative juices following. I’m talking cans of spritz and bowls of Lindt chocolates – because you can’t network without the ice breaker of which is your favourite flavour.
It was the sort of evening where you’re glad to have done a business degree and now be amongst the city’s most driven.
There was a lot of take aways from the evening, from how to create targeted audiences for your Facebook ads to which Roll’d banh mi people seem to like best (the tofu one did surprisingly well!).
But the biggest take away that many took with them as they drove back to their Melbourne homes, buzzing from the energy of a evening full of motivated females, was to have fun with content. With constant targets, goals, KPIs and the internal pressure to get results, we in the social media field can easily forget that content can be exciting. It’s not just for the audience but can be fun for us too. In order to find content that works, you need to play around with it. I want to stress the world ‘play’ there. If it’s a slog, you’re only doing yourself a disservice.
Throughout both modules, Heather stressed the need to produce content that will ‘disrupt the pattern’ of consumers’ endless scrolling. Basically, the need to create creative that will capture attention and make people want to stop and know more. Think exciting colours, flashing imagery, interesting text use, whatever would stand out amongst the sea of boundless posts. So, when generating ideas for this content, if it doesn’t excite you, the chances are it won’t make the cut in what excites your audience enough to disrupt their scroll pattern.
Even when you’ve shot your images, played around on apps to make them look snazzy and are ready to post, the time for playing is not even close to over.
One of the keys to success in the social media game is posting the right communication to the right people at the right time. Getting this right is all about testing, trying and measuring – or, playing around.
To find your right audience, you need to play around with demographics and criteria. If you have a jewellery brand, you’re going to need to test out different age ranges, interests, hobbies, careers and employment hours to find out who wants your product. You need to be testing out and getting excited about finding out what works. Facebook Ads doesn’t have to be boring – Heather proved that by talking about it to an intrigued and engaged audience for 45 minutes.
Likewise, when you’re putting your content together, you need to have content pillars: a range of buckets that your content falls into to keep your feed diverse, fresh and engaging. Putting these stacks of content together needs to be stimulating to you – you should be engaged in your own content, otherwise how can you expect others to be?
Just because we work in business, doesn’t mean we work without fun. Content is tricky, social media is demanding and can be extremely frustrating, and KPIs are hard in an ever-changing industry, so it’s up to us to enjoy the work we do.
