The 80 / 20 rule in social media marketing

Is it a cake or a meringue? 🤔 No you're right, it's a cake! 🍰 So turns out I'm using food for another marketing analogy, which seems to help explain the point and make me hungry in equal measure. 

I'm sharing a photo of this tasty looking swiss roll to help describe the 80/20 rule when it comes to your social media marketing. First of all, marketing is annoying. You are trying to invade someone's personal (digital) space to get your message across and encourage action. To do this well, you have to 'sandwich' your sales message between valuable content. Here is where the 80/20 comes in. 80% of the posts from your business social media feed should be *valuable content*, with only 20% being sales posts. 

Depending on your audience, there could be a huge variety of posts as to what is 'valuable' to them. This could be posts that:

- Entertain them (funny videos / memes)

- Inform them (industry articles / videos / infographics)

- Intrigue them (your story / behind the scenes, throwbacks etc)

- Inspire them (pretty photos, quotes)

- Excite them (competitions, giveaways)

- Shock them (topical causes / stats)

Basically, for every 'sales' post you share - you want to share around 3/4 posts of non-sales, valuable content that will appeal to your audience, make them trust/like your brand more and ultimately, be more likely to buy from you when they see the next sales post. 

If you overdo the jam (the sales posts!) you run the risk of coming across as a pushy salesman, annoying, repetitive and users will either unfollow your brand, unlike your page or simply skim past your posts without any recognition. 

Get in touch if you're looking for ideas of types of 'valuable' content you can share with your audience.

Thanks for reading!

Melissa

melissareilly3@gmail.com