How can I help you? Answering this question will serve as a guide for what we’re about to discover. I’ve been experimenting with social media advertising this past week on: Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, & Reddit. This will be less analytical and more of a real “throw it all on the wall and see what sticks” kind of approach. I’ll be honest, I have no idea what I am doing and frankly, the idea of advertising and marketing makes me squeamish. But I know that this brand has a message that is worth sharing. I want to create a real community and I’m hoping that by overcoming this learning curve, it will help us get there. The results are finally in and I was really surprised. Here’s what I found out.
The advertisements I ran were the product video, the facebook page, and a blog post. The results showed some basic demographics for those who responded to the advertisement. Besides clicks or how many people saw them, I wanted to focus on the community I want to build. For this, they give me: age, gender, location, android or apple phone, & general interests. At first, I thought it was a little scary. I see the internet and social media apps as a highway system of toll roads. But we pay with our information instead of money. When we use “free” social media apps, we agree to these terms & conditions. Social media apps are simply information brokers. They help brands and companies when they want to connect with people that are likely to share the same values. It took some time reframe this concept into the fact that it’s simply a tool. What’s important is how that tool is used.
"Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."
I love to do my own thinking. What I discovered is that people really connected with the Facebook page’s quote and origin story blog post. I noticed that social media apps serve people by giving them content in formats they prefer. The writers and readers are on Twitter. The visually-inclined are on Instagram. The funny people are on TikTok. The educators are on YouTube. Business people are on LinkedIn. I consider Facebook as a family and group-oriented platform. Using what I know, my best guess forward is to start building our brand on Facebook. As we grow, I would like to start showing some incredible photos from the community on our Instagram hopefully using our product. Create blooper reels or funny ideas on building the brand via TikTok. Create longer-form, valuable educational entertainment on YouTube. Continuing our blog and posting it on Twitter for anyone to follow. Facebook will tie everything in together and create the platform to engage with and talk directly with our community. It will be so much fun and it doesn’t sound like work to me because I genuinely want to help simplify and zen your life in every way I can think of. This is our journey and you can be a part of it too!