TSH 24: How to make social media work for your business

Reading time, 4 mins 20 seconds.

You’re unlikely to succeed in ecommerce without being pretty good when it comes to social media.

The good news is that you can start today and make steady improvements.

You’ll need a strategy.

That’s right, strategy. You can’t be posting when you feel like it, with no purpose or intent, or when you just remember to. 

 Here are four things to help make social media work for your business:

 1. Develop your brand’s social media pillars

 Your pillars are the themes that you believe will drive your growth. Remember, people use social media primarily for information and entertainment, so we don’t want to continuously shove product images down users throats. A reminder on how to establish your brand pillars here. 

For example you might have a light-hearted brand that’s playful, and uses humour as one of its pillars, like my client Budgy Smuggler. Or you might have a sustainable product that helps reduce waste, and you determine that education will be one of your pillars, so you use your socials to help people learn DIY tricks to reduce their household contribution to landfill.

The point is, selling should be the last thing on your mind when it comes to your social pillars.

2. Hook ‘em, hold ‘em, convert ‘em

If you’re running ads on social media (which 99% of you are), there are three parts to a great ad, and they’re often neglected. Here I'm speaking mainly about video creative, which you should be trying.

Remember, focusing on ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) at the macro level is ok, although there’s a whole bunch of reasons why hyper-fixation on ROAS can actually limit your growth (think about the pond that you’re fishing in that runs out of fish). I prefer MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio) as the main paid media KPI, however neither of those metrics tell you whether your creative is actually any good.

CTR (Click Through Rate) is great, in that it tells you the percentage of people who click on your ad, after seeing it. At a basic level, your ads with a higher CTR are driving more traffic than the ones with a lower CTR, which means that ad is better, right?

Sort of. 

We need to dissect your video a little more than that. Your video ad is broken into three parts:

The Hook

The first part of the video. Your job is to 'hook’ the user in. This is the first line of your ad copy (the text or caption), and/or the opening three seconds of your video. A good strategy is to pose a big question in your hook, and to answer it in the hold (the body). 

Here are a couple of example of hooks:

We’ve invented a spray that cleans any stain! Here’s how it works.

We’ve created a t-shirt guaranteed to make your stomach look flatter - Check these results out!

This iPhone case is indestructible - We put it to the test!

How many kilos can our hammocks take?*

*I actually borrowed the last one from Nakie - one of my favourite pieces of clever content. You can see the video here.

The hook isn’t exclusively an ‘ad thing’. Authors and journalists also use hooks to get readers to continue reading. That’s your job. Provoke interest with your hooks, don’t just hit record and start talking or filming.

If your product solves a problem, the hook can pose the problem, and the body can answer the problem using your product demonstration.

The Hold

This is the body of your video. If the hook poses a juicy question, the hold should answer it. This is the story telling part of the creative - or the part that answers the question posed in the hook.

Let's use the example of the iPhone hook “This iPhone case is indestructible - We put it to the test”. In the hold, or the body, your video should aim to demonstrate this. For example the video could show various heavy items landing on the iPhone case, proving its durability. 

The CTA - Call to Action

This is the end of the video or copy. Here is where you need to urge the user to act, whether that’s to sign up, buy now, register now, or whatever the desired action is. A good CTA will often highlight a sense of urgency, or FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). For example “Sign up now, places are limited” or “Only 24 pieces left, get yours now”. 

Tip:

You should be testing multiple creative assets at once and reshooting based on the data. I have one client that runs 150 ads at any one time, then culls from there. As an example, I might shoot three videos for the same product or service, then review the ads performance after a couple of weeks. I take the best hook, the best hold and the best CTA from each ads, and I reshoot that video with the combined hook/hold/CTA.

I then rerun the ad, and often that will dramatically increase my results. 

 The point is, don’t just run creative. Test and learn from your creative, learn from your best hooks, holds and CTAs and use them moving forward in new video, or reshoot to perfect your existing ads. If you’re just running ads and adjusting budgets, you’re not really optimizing your campaigns, you’re just hoping to get lucky.

Let’s dive a little deeper into testing the Hook, Hold and CTA:

 If I have three videos running in Meta, instead of only looking at the video with the highest CTR, I should be looking at the videos with the best hook, hold, and CTA.

 Video one might have a high portion of users watching for three seconds, but dropping off after that, and not getting to the end. Good hook - poor hold.

Video two might have a lower rate of viewers in the three second section, however a larger percentage are staying till the end. Poor hook, good hold.

 Video three might have low numbers in the three second section, and reaching the end of the video, but the percentage clicking on the link at the end, or taking action on the CTA might be quite high. Poor hook, poor hold, good CTA.

 Personally when I review these stats, I then reshoot.

 So I am reshooting by taking the hook from video one, shooting it with the body of video two, and adding the CTA from video three.

3. Create once, publish multiple times

You need to create your own content generating machine that pumps out content across your appropriate channels. For example:

You might have a business selling pilates equipment. You decide to start a Vlog on YouTube, and with education as one of your brand’s social media pillars. 

 Once a week you shoot a video teaching someone a new Pilates move, exercise or circuit (are they even called moves? You get the idea). Your video might be 15 minutes long, and from that you edit two ‘shorts’ at 60 seconds long, which you then repurpose into Instagram Reels and TikToks.

 From one recording, you’ve created a long form YouTube video, two reels, and two TikToks - the start of your content generation machine. 

Here’s an example of how I might do that. I might turn this newsletter into a Podcast episode, which will be published on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, and all the other podcast platforms. I might then snip two portions for LinkedIn posts, two tweets, two threads, and take two ideas for reels, which I then also repurpose across TikTok and YouTube shorts. So this newsletter could feed my content across up to 10 platforms!

4. Try posting every day for 30 days to grow your organic socials

If you’re hoping to go viral, you’re probably going to be disappointed. The best creators will tell you that consistency is the key.

 If you challenge yourself to post every day for thirty days on your platform or platforms of choice, what you’ll have after 30 days is a data set of 30 creative assets to learn from, and guaranteed growth in some form. 

Tip: 

The three month rule. If you’ve posted something, and it’s performed well, recycle it every three months. Reshoot it or rewrite it and post again, it’s likely to perform just as well if not better.

 Remember, you’re in the digital business, and social media is likely to be the driving force of your digital traffic, so what are you waiting for - start posting, we have to start somewhere!

 Until next week,

 Paul

If you want to work with me, here's how:

1. Take my Free Ecommerce Masterclass '90 Days to Ecommerce Success' here. 

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