If you put a lot of effort into a piece of content and you don’t get a ton of likes, heart reacts, comments, or shares? Is it even worth the effort?
The short answer is: Absolutely.
The long answer has to do with the hidden reward of content marketing. The metric that Google Analytics, Facebook’s Creator Studio, YouTube Studio, etc. can’t track and that’s audience perception.
Audience Perception
Audience perception is what happens when someone hears about you and they go to look you up on social media. What will they see? Will they see a robust page with an “About” section all filled out, a nice cover photo, a branded logo, and informational bits of content that span a myriad of different content types: podcasts, still images, quote posts, blogs, video clips, and so on?
Or will they see a shell of a page with a silhouette avatar, a poorly written “About” section, some stock photos wishing you a Merry Christmas from 2009, and a competitor’s blog post that you mistakenly shared thinking you were sharing to your personal account?
You had them in your grasp…
They heard about you…
They were interested…
They looked you up…
And you dropped the ball.
What do you think their perception of you is after looking at your half-baked Facebook page or outdated Instagram Feed? I’d bet it isn’t good.
You probably lost them and it’s all because you didn’t look like a real business on social media.
What a shame.
A social presence has become this century’s website. If you didn’t have a website after 1990, you weren’t even really trying to succeed in business and the same can be said of social media in this day and age.
Without some sort of content strategy on social, you’ve already failed.
