The Secret Sauce of Social Media Success

Have you ever wondered if there could be a formula for growth on Social Media? or a formula that gives you assurance of Social Media Success? I believe that there is no guaranteed formula and a lot of people would agree with me. However, if something can be a guideline for proven success, it would be these 3Cs: Content, Consistency & Collaboration.

What is the most common thing in all Social Media Celebrities?

Look around for a few social media Influencers or Youtubers or even bloggers. How they have built their audience. The major thing that they focus on is Content Creation, and when I say content creation, it is not just creating anything. They maintain the quality of their content, focus on what their audience loves to watch, see or simply consume.

They are super consistent, most of them post daily on at least one of the social media platforms. And they keep collaborating with others. So let’s try and understand the three Cs and their importance for the growth of your social media channels.

What should you focus on? Is it likes or sales?

First things first, do you just want to grow your presence in terms of the number of followers and likes? Or you want to achieve business objectives? I would always be happy if I would get more clicks to my offers page than the number of likes on my Instagram post. You need to be super sure of what you actually want to achieve and then plan your activities accordingly.

So here is the 3C formula that every Internet entrepreur has successfully executed. Every Yotuber follows it religusly, every successful Instagrammer does it. So there is no secret sauce, it is quite open and evident mechanism that you need to follow.

Content – Consistency – Collaboration

CONTENT

You can’t build an online presence without content. I personally don’t like the line “Content is King and blah blah”. Because this is understatment. Content is th backbone or Oxygen of your marketing efforts. If you don’t have content you don’t have online presence.

The next question could be which form of the content I am talking about? It could be anything that you love and feel you can do justice with. I mean a simple text blog is still better than doing nothing or posting nothing on your social media. Check out this post of mine that would help you in putting up a right strategy for your content: “7 Steps to Succeed with Social Media”

Whichever industry you are in, it is important to focus on solving problems of your consumers or customers. Create content that solves problem. Connects meaningfully with your audience and invites them to engage on a daily basis.

CONSISTENCY

Do you know what is common in all those successful social media celebrities like Gary Vee, Grant Cardone, Tai Lopez, or even Indian successful Youtubers like Bhuvan Bham or Gaurav Chaudhary

All of them have one thing in common – CONSISTENCY. They are super consistent in creating content which actually translates into a digital currency of fans and followers.

Few of these people post 3-4 posts daily on social media, few just a few posts weekly. But they all do it with consistency. Their fans even know when exactly they post & what sort of content they post on what date and time.

Social Media is not different for brands or individuals. In fact, it is not at all for brands until they start to act like humans. As a business, you need to understand how these platforms work and what do they need from you. You need to be creating quality content with consistency and that’s the only way forward.

Prepare a monthly social media plan of posts (images, blogs, infographics, videos, lives) and execute on a timely basis. Connect with your audience at an individual level. Do it for a couple of months and you will see a drastic growth in your audience.

When I say engage with your audience, it is not just those people who are interacting with your content. It should be people in general who are active in your space and interact with other brands or business. Leaving a valuable comment on someone else’s post in the same category would definitely give you organic reach and followers.

COLLABORATION

You are creating good quality content, you are regularly or consitently posting on your social media channels. Even you are running some advertisements too to reach out to your prospects. But you are not seeing subsequent growth in your followers. Your audience network is not expanding.

Collaboration on social media is the key to grow and nurture your audience. Coming back to the same examples of Yotubers, Vlogers, Bloggers etc. All they do is collaborate with each other to help each other grow.

When you do a video or a piece of content in collaboration with the other social media personality, it helps you to attract their audience to come on your platforms. Similarly it helps them to attract your audience to their channels.

This looks quite simple for influencers, social media people and bloggers. As they can look for social celebrities in the same domain and request to appear on their channel or vice versa. However, for businesses you need to be a little creative.

A brand or a business can simply look for collaborations with the following three types of poeple:

1. Their exisiting customers
2. Their fans on social media channels
3. Social celebrities who could fit in their cusomers profile

You can simply, give away some of your products or trail period of your products. Or invite them to a luxury experience where you demo your products and give them some gift hampers. You need to be a little creative with each category on how they can be part of your campaign.

Customers get a chance to be featured on your channels, fans get rewarded with cash or goods, Social celebrities can get both and some monetary benefits if required. The social media celebrities or influencers can bring in a wider range of audience, there is no harm in paying for this collaboration.

As I said, there is no silver bullet to success. Social Media requires a lot of hard work and consistency to build an audience. When you reach a point that your audience starts to follow you despite the platforms, consider you have done something good.

Reality Check

Most of the successful Youtubers have never spend a single penny on advertising. If you think you don’t have budgets for advertising and that’s the reason you can’t grow. You are definitely fooling yourself.

All you need to do is to be smarter with your communication. Always have an offer for your audience. If you won’t sell anything and just keep trying to build an audience of no base. I feel it would be really foolish.

If you have only 2000 followers on Instagram but you are being able to achieve your sales target. What could be better than that?

Think about it carefully, before investing your next quarter into something. Always keep your targets right, positive cash flow will help you succeed in all the aspects 🙂 Feel free to drop your thoughts in comments below.