“Should I do LinkedIn polls more often? They get me a lot of engagement!”
“What’s the best time to post on Instagram in India?”
“No one clicks on my links on Twitter anymore. Should I do a thread, instead?”
I get asked these questions a lot in my personal branding sessions for corporates. While I have strong personal views on LinkedIn Polls, let me move past these pointed questions and address a much more important—and basic—point.
When it comes to content on social media, most people focus inordinately on reach than their own thoughts on content or its quality.
The intent seems to start from ‘how can I reach more, and more, people?’ and considerably less focus on ‘how can I share better things of better value to specific sets of target audiences?’.
The broader influencer model is usually built on ‘famous for being famous’. Meaning: the more the number of followers, the more zeroes I can add to my rate card. This is hardly wrong and is just another way to think about online content.
The one I believe in, and advocate as a formal, thought-through process is the opposite of famous-for-being-famous: famous-for-X, Y, and Z.
This means that the starting point is not to worry about follower count or reach. The starting point is always, ‘what do I want people to know me for/as?’.
This start leads to knowing the chosen topics/subjects well enough to share views on them consistently.
Within this exercise, reach becomes a sub-objective. But even here, any kind of reach is
pointless. The focus should ideally be on targeted reach. In other words, if your chosen subject is HR, the objective should be, ‘how can I be more known among people interested in HR, while keeping my content approachable to a wider set of readers?’.
It is easy to succumb to the trend of the season to run after engagement and Likes on social media.
Polls are working? Let me do polls.
Posting about NFTs helps increase Likes? Let me find ways to write about NFTs.
Everyone’s talking about a cricket match? Let me offer my take on the match too to get more views on my tweet.
These are not wrong at all – after all, whatever works for you is right. But consider the point of doing them. What do they do to your content and your perception among the people that may read it?
Once you are able to identify the topics that you want to be known for, the next priority that helps is to make content creation on those topics a regular habit.
One of Bruce Lee’s famous quotes is ‘Long-term consistency trumps short term intensity’.
This applies to many things in our lives.
We tend to want to become healthy suddenly one day and start being extra conscious about what we eat. After a few days, we go back to our old ways.
We tend to start a burst of activities towards being more fit and add exercise regimen. After a few days, we get tired of the routine and go back to our old ways.
Short-term intensity around the trend of the season is less useful overall than being consistent in the long-term in your chosen area.
One of the best ways to build your personal brand is to simply show up every single day, day after day, by sharing your perspective on your chosen subjects (whatever they may be). Everything else that moves away from this core is a distraction.
You can obviously get distracted and dither here and there. That’s only human. But try getting back to the core, without worrying about reach, Likes, engagement, trending ideas per season, and so on.
You’d then realize that the most important element to show up every day, day after day on your chosen subjects is to know/read more and more on those subjects.
To know/read more and more on those subjects, you need to build content pipelines on those subjects so they come to you fast and easy instead of you starting with a blank Google search every time you want to read up on them.
The more time you spend reading/knowing/watching and assimilating the raw material, the more easily and effortlessly you will build opinions in your own head.
And then it’s just a matter of articulating one thread among many such opinions and sharing them online on a chosen platform/platforms.
That said, you should also be concerned about ‘am I being read/heard/seen at all?’ when you show up every day.
If you show up every day with your views and you ascertain that no one is reading/listening to you, then you need ways to course-correct yourself.
But even inside the spectrum of ‘am I being read/heard/seen?’ what should be your priority is the 90+% of the internet that is entirely passive. These are the people who do not leave any digitally trackable methods to know that they have read/listened to/consumed something online. This means these are not the people who Like, Comment, Share your content – they just consume and move on. This is the vast majority of people online.
A longer, deeper look at the power of silent/passive online audience, from my earlier post.
PS: About LinkedIn polls 🙂 Do consider the very point of sharing a poll. What do people gain from seeing the responses (and the numbers)? What do you gain/understand? Are you planning to share your perspective based on the responses? Or, are you starting a poll only because everyone else is doing too and getting *tons* of *engagement?