Social media audiences seem to be splintering into smaller, more insulated groups. More of these groups are private.
Facebook page posts reach no one unless they are boosted. Even when they are boosted, they are ignored. How can a small business reach and connect with customers?
We are all wearier of anything that looks like an ad. We have developed the ability to tune out anything that is not immediately relevant. We only see what we want to see.
What does this mean for marketers?
There are two things marketers need to be doing now.
1) Find and connect with the leaders/influencers of the small groups where potential clients hang out. Then create content that is for and about this group. Join the conversations they are having, and contribute in a meaningful way without asking for anything or promoting yourself. Let the leader of the group share the content you created for them. Make them the hero. Self-promotion will get you banned and forgotten.
2) Create YouTube and blog content that is optimized for SEO. Optimizing for SEO today does not mean trying to work the system or trying to game the algorithms. Search engines only exist to give people what they want. They invest millions (maybe billions) in trying to more accurately guess what someone is looking for. These people are way smarter than me. I am never going to beat them at their game.
The only way to effectively optimize for SEO is to optimize for your customer. The more useful content is to humans, the more Google and YouTube will serve it up in search results.
There’s something that I can do better than the big search engines. I can use empathy to make a real human connection with someone who is trying to solve a problem. Why surrender to technology when I can fight the attention battle on a level that computerized algorithms and technology never can.