With the proliferation of artificial intelligence and its increased use in the content creation space, there’s a seeming downwards trend towards sameness. To help others avoid getting pulled into the vortex, Zoetica Media founder Kami Huyse shared how to stand out on social media in an original and memorable way.
Avoid These Five Common Mistakes
Not doing the wrong things is as important as doing the right things, Kami knows. She therefore shared the main points from Renae Gregoire‘s Forbes article 5 Trust Busters Ruining Your B2B Marketing Content as a warning of things to avoid.
First is creating “generic and non-specific content. That is really, really a bad thing because a lot of people are putting things out there that are so shallow… they don’t really solve a problem.”
Second is spitting out content that everyone else is already producing: “Same old, same old repetitive content. So just taking the same content, you know, regurgitating it and then putting it back out again.”
Third is avoiding low-quality gated content. “If people are giving you their email, they're downloading something, and they're expecting a specific solution, and then all you give them is like sort of a thinly veiled sales pitch, that is not working, and in fact it's making your brand diluted and it's giving you a bad name with people,” she explains.
Fourth is sharing stale data and outdated information. “If you're going to put together an article or a piece of content, make sure you're using data that's closer to/ up-to-date, that's really important. And then not just taking the same things and rehashing them,” she says.
Fifth and last is producing content that promises insights but in reality is simply a sales pitch. Kami has strong feelings about this in particular.
“What I've really hated, I'll just say this, I have really hated when I download something because I want to read it, I want to get to know the person, I want to see how they think, and then immediately they pitch me. Like, you know, they’ll like, you know, they'll pitch me in a DM or they'll pitch me somewhere [else]…. Cut it out, cut it out, I hate this stuff.”
Instead, Adopt These Positive Approaches to Get Noticed on Social Media
Rather than engage in any of these mistakes, Gregoire recommends adopting more positive approaches such as storytelling, sharing fresh insights and data, doing a deep dive with experts, and offering problem-solving toolkits.
Kami has her own list of recommendations, which she developed during her decades-long career in public relations. Best of all, they work for consultants and communications professionals who struggle with trying to compete against “entertaining” content creators on social media.
1. Be Non-Googleable: Rather than regurgitate the same information found all over the place online, create unique content.
“You don't want to have the information you're putting out there being just the first 10 results on
Google because you've rehashed it. A lot of people do that because it gives them good SEO results, because they're trying to compete with those top articles, but that is the problem, she says. “We can't just keep falling back on what we know, the tried, the true… you need to be thinking about things in fresh and interesting ways and package them in ways that make people stand up and take notice.”
2. Be a Story Collector: In communication, we often hear about the importance of storytelling, but part of being strong in this area is not just the telling, but also the collecting part.
“You can't just be a storyteller, you can't stand on your little pedestal and just tell these stories, you know, people get bored, so your stories have to connect to the problem the person is having,” she shares. “You need to be collecting your stories and putting them in some sort of format.” You do this by inventorying your stories and matching them to a problem.
Kami recommends inventorying your stories and matching them to a problem. “If somebody [in my Smart Social Mastery program] tells me a really cool story about a problem they solved, I ask them to please put it into their [story] vault.” The vault can be as simple as one column in a two-column spreadsheet. “Then, in another column, you have what problem it solves. And that way you have this really good amount of backend research of stories that you can use in different kinds of content like live streams or ads or even in content that you're doing to teach somebody.”
3. (Really) Solve a Problem: Customers seek solutions to their problems, so if you offer them a tangible solution to their actual problems, you increase your chances of breaking through your competitors' noise.
“How do you know what people's problems are? I'll tell you how you know – you create and you foster a community of people that you're helping, and then they will share with you what their problems are on the regular so you don't have to go out and beg for understanding or guess, even worse.” Once you know what their actual problems are, “you can make different messages for different different groups.”
4. Stand for Something: Perhaps the most important of all is to stand for something. When someone stands for something, it demonstrates their integrity and accountability, which can earn respect and admiration from others.
Kami explains that, “it's about having a clear and distinctive viewpoint,” which is important so that “people know who you are as a brand, who you are as a person.” Developing a distinctive voice is a part of having a distinctive viewpoint, she feels. Employees can play an important part in this. “Get your employees to help you with that, have them help you be that distinctive voice.” Remember that “you don't have to be entertaining, you just have to have a point of view that people can listen to.”
To dive deeper into all the details, watch Kami’s full livestream.