PSA: Business Is Not a Popularity Contest

“Could you boost this post for $500? We really need the engagement… Oh and while you’re at it could you boost this one…and this one…and this one?”

“We’re hiring another social media manager so we can try to increase our Instagram following to 200,000+...How much are we paying them? Oh, it’s just another $3000/month on top of the $3000/mo we’re already paying our first SMM.”

“Ugh. Our competitor has 40,000 fans and we just have 1,000. How are they so successful?”

These are all things I’ve heard during my 12+ years as a social media marketer and digital advertiser. Unfortunately for many of my clients, the nature of social media and competition for follower counts and engagement metrics seems to have clouded their judgment. It warps their focus, causing them to spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on stats and figures that have little to do with their bottom line.

How to Run a Business for Dummies

Many of my clients have MBAs. They’re anywhere from 30-60. They’ve either been marketers themselves, business consultants, engineers, or CEOs. They should be performance driven but they aren’t. 

That’s because we have an innate human need to compare ourselves to others and to our competitors – and while that’s healthy to a point, it can be devastatingly detrimental to your business if you prioritize low-impact activities instead of the tasks and projects which are directly tied to revenue generation.

At the end of the day, if you have investors your job is to provide a return on their investment. If you don’t have investors, you still have a duty to yourself to provide a return on investment. Period. 

Why Organic Social Media Doesn’t Translate to Success

Don’t get me wrong, I started my career as a community manager and organic social media marketer. Organic posts can contribute to your bottom line but often don’t. The truth is that it’s notoriously difficult to actually gauge performance on organic social media content. It’s an example of what’s known as ‘indirect marketing’.

While putting your product or service out there is important and ‘raising awareness is important and should be pursued, you should think to yourself whether the cost and return on awareness are justified. Too many times I see businesses throwing thousands of dollars into activities that return hundreds back. A 10% ROI is never good no matter how much you try to spin it or ‘suppose’ you might get back in the long run. 

Engagement figures and follower counts do not translate into sales. You could have an Instagram page with a million followers and 25,000 post engagements and not make a single attributable sale. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen numerous times. 

Furthermore, another issue with organic social media marketing is that you should be following an 80/20 breakdown for informative vs overtly promotional material. Let’s say you are paying your social media marketer $3000/mo for their services, that means that you’re spending $2400 of that money on activities that are unlikely to actually provide you with a sale in the short to medium term. When one considers that most new businesses are around for 2.5 years, you have to think: will spending that budget (or my own time) on an activity that won’t pay out in about a year really be worth it?

Your Business Competitors Aren’t Better Than You

…just because they have more followers or higher engagement rates. To believe that they’re having more success than you is just another example of what’s known as the heuristic bias.

The heuristic bias occurs when people make judgments or decisions based on the information that is most readily available to them, rather than considering all available information. 

In this case, the person is assuming that their competitors are more successful because they have more likes on social media, without considering other factors that may contribute to their success, such as the quality of their products or services, their marketing strategy, or their customer service. The availability heuristic bias can lead to inaccurate judgments and decisions, as it can cause people to overlook important information that is not as readily available or salient.

It should also be noted that even if social media posts was a major source of your competitor’s success, the heuristic bias would prevent you from realizing that many times the reason why something works is because of the entire holistic marketing strategy that supports it. Simply lifting a tactic without replicating the entire strategy is a recipe for disaster – rarely has this worked out the way that it’s intended. Usually, it’s a waste of time and ends up being a distraction from identifying strategies that are tailored to your business reality.

How To Find Your Business Focus

In order to truly achieve success, I recommend adopting an 80/20 mindset. For those of you that are unfamiliar, the 80/20 mindset is an application of Pareto’s Principle, a concept that suggests that 80% of the outcomes are generated by 20% of the inputs or efforts. 

In business, the 80/20 mindset can be applied in a number of ways. For example, it can be used to identify the 20% of customers who generate 80% of revenue, or the 20% of products that generate 80% of profits. By focusing on these key inputs or efforts, businesses can maximize their results and achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness.

The 80/20 mindset can also be applied to personal productivity and time management. By identifying the 20% of tasks that generate 80% of results, individuals can prioritize their efforts and focus on the most important activities, rather than getting bogged down in less productive tasks.

Start thinking about your business, the projects that you have in order to increase revenue, and how everyone involved at your company is spending their time. If this is too abstract, you might be well served by using the Veitia Matrices to ground you and anchor you in a way that allows you to identify the highest impact task at any given time.

If you do decide to use the Veitia Matrices, I’ve created a set of downloadable templates that you can print at home. In order to get them, just enter your email below and the printable PDFs will be sent right to your inbox.