You must have seen the ads for Mutual Funds or heard many financial analysts talking about the ‘power of compounding’. It is a simple yet very powerful concept – that by doing small things in a consistent manner you achieve a large result. In marketing communications, especially in Social Media, this concept holds true. Many a time we focus on creating that ‘perfect’ social media post – a post that takes eons to create. If not that it is the emphasis on the first few posts once you start a social media channel and thereafter losing steam that causes your social media strategy/tactic to fizzle out.

When a brand identity is created you will observe that the identity goes well with almost every type of communication/requirement that you want. But you may be feeling slightly left out with certain pieces because you feel that it is not ‘fitting’. For the sake of the identity, you go ahead with it. So is the case with social media posts. Not everything will be clutter-breaking, highly creative, extremely relevant, or even adequately informative. But what builds your brand on social media is being on the dot every time with communication.

As you must have realised by now, Social Media consumption is like a ‘habit’. It has become similar to your daily routines and habits. You follow either times, or occasions, or triggers to consume social media. Now various channels have different algorithms as to how your posts will show and to how many they will show. By being consistent in terms of timing you can ensure over a period that 2 things will happen – your followers expect posts and will keep coming back to see the updates and by that your posts start reaching a larger audience.

Apart from planned posts, Social Media is also a great place for ‘leveraging’ topical and popular trends. These are reactive in nature. These too should be done but the focus must always be on the planned posts and their consistency. So to keep it that way some pointers:

  1. Make a calendar of content or types of content that you will post (for example on Mondays it will take about benefits, Tuesdays will be for customer voices and so on)
  2. Stick to the calendar no matter what – meaning if required some content may be reused as well
  3. Involve interactivity so that it balances between passive and involved interactions
  4. Rotate between brand communications and specific feature communications
  5. Remember that there will be hundreds of opportunities to say all that you want – hence let each communication focus on just one point
  6. Use a publishing tool like Hootsuite so that the emphasis is on consistency