Don’t do it for the likes
It seems many companies put all their marketing chips on social media, so much that the means begin to look like the end. However, you cannot pay your bills with followers and likes.
My (limited) experience with social media advertising has been quite surprising. Admittedly, I’m also comparing apples to oranges, as the two companies I have experience with utilizing social media are in completely different industries.
Food Pedaler delivers for restaurants in St. Louis, on demand and on bikes. We made a concerted effort to develop a brand, complete with fancy brand guide. We spent money to post regularly on Instagram, and have experimented with promoted posts. Despite our efforts, after nearly 6 years we have an embarrassingly low number of visits to our profile, and zero known conversions from ads.
Last year, my wife and I started Perennial City. We pickup organics — food scraps, plant trimmings, paper, etc — from peoples’ homes and we have a special craft process to trasform these residuals into wonderful compost. We are in turn building urban farms in North St. Louis. For this buness, we created social accounts solely because they are essentially required to validate your existence in 2019. Only active on Instragram, we’ve posted 35 times in about 15 months. Those pictures repost to Facebook and Twitter, with a disclaimer that we are not very responsive. Despite lack of any real effort, Perennial City’s Instagram will soon have twice as many followers as Food Pedaler after just a year. It receives 20 to 30 times as many profile visits each week, and a remarkable amount of interaction on posts.
Of course, on demand restaurant delivery and community-scale composting are two different animals. Regarding the former, billions of dollars is being dumped every year into some of the highest valued companies in order to secure monopolies. No doubt, that is difficult to compete with. My point today is not to share a David and Goliath story. I want to speak to the latter, and why I believe it resonates so much.
Perennial City is focused on a passion and mission, and that excites people, and they want to keep up with what is going on.
Keep your purpose (not promotion) the objective, and you attract your perfect audience.
