That’s quite the statement I know. But if you’ve been putting out social media content based around awareness days this year, then you might be surprised to know that for some businesses it can not only be neutral on their engagement levels but actually detrimental.
That’s right.
That content could be hurting how the algorithm sees your account, and therefore how it serves up your content in the future. The complete opposite of the effect you’re hoping for.
But there is some good news.
Awareness Days are really effective on social media
As contrary as that sounds, there definitely are some businesses that benefitted from different kinds of awareness days. The deciding factors seem to be the size of your social media following, and the type of day you’re building your content around.
There is no one size fits all answer.
Why does it matter?
Care = ranking
If you’re going to take the time to create content, then you want it to be worthwhile. It means both serving the needs of our audience and keeping the algorithm happy.
And our feed rankings are based, among other things, on how much someone cares about what you do. Do they like it, watch it, comment on it, share it? Those things are our friends, and tumbleweed is the enemy.
With the major social media channels now being ranked feeds rather than chronological, then people see more from the things they care about. First and foremost, it tries to give them content from their friends and family. After that, it’s about the accounts they care about, and it measures care by engagement levels.
The less they care about what you post, the less they see of it.
So, what kind of days do work?
First and foremost, it depends on the size of your social media following. For those with less than 1,000 followers, the answer seemed to be pretty much any kind of awareness day.
It then changes from focusing on things that are directly related to your business, through to the weird and wacky, but again depends on follower levels. I looked at Instagram and Twitter, and there were differences between the two as well.
What do I mean by do they work?
For this research, I looked at the raw numbers, so whether the number of likes, comments and shares increased compared to a “normal” tweet or Instagram post. And that can look quite good; the actual numbers might go up for all kinds of awareness days content.
These are the sorts of numbers we often get hung up. They’re vanity measures in many ways, like the number of followers. What we really want is engaged followers, even if that’s a smaller number. That’s why I looked at the engagement rate, which is probably a more valuable measure.
And that’s where you can begin to see the negative impact of some businesses compared to just normal content.
What to do in 2021
There are some upsides for some sizes of social media following where awareness days could be really positive in terms of improving engagement. Here’s the things I’d be thinking about:
- Focus on the right kind of day for your size of social media following
- Take the time to create different content for the different channels, given the differences between the results.
- Engage with everyone who takes the time to engage with what you do. It’s all about care, attention and engagement.
- Check your dates, that the day is still happening. After 2020, take nothing for granted on this front!
I had a great chat with a marketing consultant who confirmed that they’d seen the same with a business under 1000 followers, that awareness day content for them was content wasted. Who has the time for that?
Find out what your business should be doing
If you want to see what the results are for businesses similar in size to yours, then click on the button below to get hold of the research. It’s a good idea to take the time to just review your own results and then compare them to these. I’ve included how I’ve calculated the engagement rate, in case you’ve not done it before.
Time is one of our most precious commodities, so don’t waste it by working on stuff that won’t be of value to your business. Click below to see where you might want to spend your time in 2021.
