How to get good at social media?

In the offline world, much of what "trends" is stuff that hacks people's reward system.

E.g., high-fructose corn syrup, french fries, nicotine, slot machines.

It's bad for us long term, but satisfies our evolved physiological needs in the short term.

Most of the trending content on social media is the same, and much of modern news and commerce has adapted to it.

From what you've said, you're trying to win at the same game, against people/companies who are far more experienced, skilled, resourced and cynical than you.

The answer: don't play that game.

Find a small niche of people you can satisfy with earnestly good quality content.

Think really small - like, 5-10 people, who you can get to know personally and whose interests you can address really really well.

Then grow gradually.

It will seem painfully slow at first, but with a consistent effort over a long enough period of time, you can achieve exponential growth and eventually build a huge audience that really cares about what you have to offer.

One of the best people to follow for guidance on how to do this is Seth Godin. Follow his daily blogs/emails, and read his books, particularly Linchpin, Permission Marketing, Purple Cow and The Dip.

Simon Sinek is another person worth paying attention to.

Practice?

Seriously though, isn't this like everything? Stop trying to shortcut it and actually put in the work. The people that grew massively overnight are outliers. The other 99.9999% put in time and effort to cultivate the following they wanted.

What sort of audience do you want? What do they want to see? Put your ego aside, answer those questions, then create genuinely engaging content that ticks that box and isn't a rehash of every other account in the same niche. If you can't offer something different, why would I follow you instead of them?

A few things to consider:

Why do you want to get good at social media? You mention spamming tags and subscribing to things that they don't care about.

What is the outcome you want from this?

Getting a lot of likes/RTs? Getting a lot of followers?

If that's the outcome you want, then it sounds more like you want some form of community where you can feel appreciated or encouraged. Social Media is a vacuum of constant churn, and you won't find fulfillment there.

There are exceptions, but I strongly recommend thinking about what things you like to do and try to find your community in real life where the reward is so much higher.

Join a tabletop game club, take French cooking classes, go to some Yoga meetups.

I know now is not an opportune time to go out and meet people, but it's a hell of a lot healthier for your mind and body to be around real people when the time comes. Don't waste your time on social media right now. Build yourself up, learn something new, create something cool. If you get one of those things done, share it on social media if you want, and maybe you'll find some cool people who share your passions or interests.

> Why is it always hate, hate and hate

Anger is the most easily evoked emotional state behind sexual arousal, because it is tied to basic survival instincts. US "wild west" culture over its history has ended up making it very OK to be angry at something. This is exploited by people seeking attention.

> Why is it always politics

Politicians and their opposition pay people to to stay visible in the media and run stories about them. Facebook is also mostly used by older people who tend to be the ones to consume opinion-based cable news shows.

> celebrity expressing their "concerns"

Celebrities pay people to stay in the media and run stories about them.

> cute puppies

I think it was in the Naked Ape that I read that the "aww..." reactions produced by cuteness is evolutionarily intended to ensure people like their babies (who need non-angry-at-them parents to survive). This is exploited by people seeking attention.

If social media promotion is your job, you have to detach from it emotionally, and remember that no one is being forced to use social media, or to like anything, or repost anything. It's all on them.

I don't buy the sentiment that social media isn't "worth it".

I've made friends, started projects, had job offers, acquisition offers -- all through Twitter. Twitter opens up huge opportunities for meeting people who share your interests.

The single best resource I've seen on this is David Perell and Matthew Kobach's (recent) lecture on "How to Crush it on Twitter" [1].

They say:

- People treat social media interactions like real-life interactions: if you're selfish irl folks won't want to listen to you, so why would social media be any different? Be generous with good ideas

- Pick a niche and only tweet about that niche. This obviously has to be something you actually care about. Your niche is probably smaller than you think

- Practice and review: Post for 30 days and at the end of the month, review the likes/RTs and draw a green circle over what worked and a red circle over what didn't. Post more of what worked and you'll notice you're getting better over time.

It's an excellent watch if you are looking to deliberately grow your Twitter following and are willing to practice

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5d6zm3YbqM&feature=youtu.be

You cannot be "good" at social media in the abstract. You have to be providing the kind of entertainment people want. Yes, hate is a kind of entertainment, although an extremely unsavoury one.

Trying to piggy-back a top trend when you're unrelated is also doomed. It's just spam. As you've noticed, trying to get people who don't care to sign up to something that you evidently don't care about either is futile and demoralising.

You have to have a niche. You have to be relevant to people, not topics. Oh, and the advice is radically different depending on platform; I'm mostly HN/Twitter. Few of us is pretty enough for Instagram.

Trying to keep track of what's trending tires me out.

Are you suggesting that posting about things that are trending is what you would consider to be "good at social media"? That's not what post people would call it.

Look at what are generally considered good social media accounts - they don't follow trends. Some times they might happen to post about something that's trending, but most often the good accounts are ones that have an authentic voice about a topic they find interesting, and they don't deviate all that much. Occasionally a good account might also have a mix of a topic they care about and 'everyday life stuff' because people are human after all. No one who's really good at social media is posting about lots of disparate topics that happen to be trending at a given time.

You're copying the wrong behaviour. The marketing staff at XCorp engage in all kinds of marketing that you likelh don't want;the behaviour you are describing is either a deliberate brand awareness campaign, or an accidental pursuit of likes/follows ignoring engagement (often an easy way to boost your appraisal).

For small companies and projects:

Focus on your niche. If it isn't relevant, don't send it. Determine a relevance bar and stick to it (when you get settled you can try playing with this if you care)

Set a limit to how much you send, and over which channels. Set a target as well. Don't lower quality to meet target.

Set up triggers for relevant events (your competitors trending, HN/core forum discussions on your topic) and have a small list of things to do when they happen.

Since I'm doing other things now I'll tell you the secrets:

Basically its all anti-patterns, the things people SAY are not the things popular people are DOING. And the unorganic stuff like "buying followers/email lists" isn't the unorganic stuff that you should be paying attention to.

Long story short: don't buy people to add to the list, buy the account

On Instagram, you just buy a popular account and rebrand it. Pricing is followers multiplied by engagement. You'll figure it out. 3% higher engagement is much better than higher followers. But you can get in the door with partners with higher followers.

You break even on the account by doing paid features for like a month.

The rebrand will cause a bunch of followers to leave, so THATS when you use bots like instagress to get the attention of other real humans to offset the decline. you are never actually growing the account, teenagers in Albania and India are growing the accounts. Don't fall for the time wasting ideas, unless your time isn't valuable. You buy their already grown accounts.

Use those accounts to hack hashtags for several years. I'm not sure thats a term but here is how you do it: you take the account private, and thats when YOU pay for promotions on other people's accounts to drive real humans to your account.

When your account is private, instagram queues up follower requests 100 at a time, and when you switch back to public only 100 followers or so are added at once I think. There is some limit. The point is that you always maintain a currency of new followers that you can accept in bulk at any time.

So THEN when you post a picture with almost any hashtag (based on popularity of that tag), you can accept a TON of followers that you've been queuing for an indefinite time period - also amplified by paid promotion again - and everyone likes/engages with it quickly, pushing it to the TOP section of a popular hashtag.

Rinse, repeat.

Regarding promotions again, you also want to be in a liking ring in Instagram DMs with other popular accounts. You post your picture in those rings and they like your photo, and vice versa. I'm not sure how much this works since the friend's activity feed is gone, but it can still move your photo up on other people's normal feeds if you share followers.

Its a decent place to START your funnel these days.

I've found Twitter to be the only one really worthwhile. The key is finding thoughtful, interesting people whose opinions you care about, and then ruthlessly weeding out anything political. No matter how much I might like someone, the moment they make a political post they're gone. Political discussion can be great, but social media is simply not the place for it. You'll find that there are plenty of people who feel the same and avoid it entirely, so eventually you can build up a really cool list of interesting folks to follow and learn from.

What you need to do to promote yourself and still sleep well at night is come up with good content, and bring it up when relevant. You can easily become an outrage or clickbait factory, but that’s no fun; likewise, spamming SEO, trying to get people to do things that they don’t want to do, like subscribe to your content, pay you, or even pay attention to you is difficult if they have no reason to do so. You don’t have to “optimize”, either: not everyone ends up being hugely popular, but you can still be known for something you’re proud of.

Don't post everything mindlessly by following the latest trends. Instead, focus on a niche you're good at, a topic that interests you and you have the experience, and you will get dedicated followers who want to follow that topic.

> I feel absolutely shit when I am trying to be relevant

Sounds like you should stop. Obsessing over social media isn't healthy and unless (perhaps even if) you're doing it professionally I very much doubt it's going to bring you value proportional to it's (negative) emotional and psychological impact.

"Good" in what sense, to what end? Why are you on social media in the first place?

"Trending" is virtually always utter dreck. Advice on Reddit is to unsubscribe all default subs, on G+ it was to block or avoid "What's Hot" (a/k/a "What Snot"), and to avoid at all costs appearing on it.

My goals are, mostly, finding intelligent conversation, awareness of relevant information, and bouncing my own ideas off others, for further development and refinement. I agree strongly with this comment by @tomhoward (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22933833), especially about finding a small core group. Best discussion group I'd managed in recent years had about 50 subscribers, core actives about 15, but excellent discussion. It's since been dissolved and the platform it was hosted on shut down, but was good while it lasted.

The one secret hack I've found, on any platform which suports it, is "block f---wits":

https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102504802435025145

Effectively it's a S/N boost mechanism by curtailing noise sources. It's remarkably effective.

For HN, that's not possible, but moderator intervention and user flags tend to be highly effective.

What's the end goal for which you feel you need to get good at social media?

The thing to consider about "social media" is it's a term that's taken out of the pages of 1984, like the Ministry of Peace. It's social in the way that social experiments or popularity contests are "social", not as in hanging out with friends and feeling good.

There are many, many people whose entire job is to get good at jumping through these hoops, and even then most of them fail. So the best thing you can do for yourself is decide you're not a monkey or a lab rat.

I'm guessing you have in mind something you'd like to promote, even if it's just yourself and your thoughts. And I second the suggestion to build a tiny audience at first. Even if it's just 5 people who absolutely love what you do - that's a start.

The way to get these people is to step out of dystopia-land and recall how it works in real life, and mimicking that in whatever social network you feel is most relevant to your objectives. For me, that social network is LinkedIn. [I left any others I was on.]

I've written an entire detailed article on how to take this approach, which is different to the traditional "gain a following", but ends up building actual relationships. You might find stuff in it relevant to your needs.

https://medium.com/skill-strong/how-to-network-on-linkedin-w...

I have no affiliation, just a happy customer, but the Holloway Guide to Twitter is a great, lengthy resource for Twitter at least, probably applicable across platforms for the most part: https://www.holloway.com/g/using-twitter

I help run a small all-volunteer non-profit that advocates for trail access for mountain bikes (CRAMBA - https://cramba.org), along with trail maintenance, design, building, etc. I've found the best way to get a good response on social media for promoting our topics is to have them be relevant to the audience.

Literally, posts and things that are stuff people are interested in (new trails, COVID-19 closure info, trail conditions, asking what they did on the trails this past weekend) get very good engagement and they get info out there. Stuff that's only peripherally related trying to gain likes and followers and whatnot just seem... meh.

So, the short answer to what works for us? Not trying to game things and providing actual, nice content. It also keeps our audience very focused.

I think one tweet that stood out to me not sure who it was by is that each social media platform requires a different set of skills to be good at it.

So I think the best step is to pick one social media platform and study people who have successfully gained traction on that specific platform.

> Trying to keep track of what's trending tires me out

From your post, it sounds like you are tying to spam everything with irrelevant content just to try to trap people into getting something they don't want.

Maybe you feel bad because that's a bad way to behave?

Social media is what you make it. If you are promoting a product you like in areas where it is relevant then maybe you'd feel better?

Others have suggested finding a niche and working that, which is a great approach.

Otherwise, if you product isn't about cute puppies why do you care if others are posting them? I use Twitter, Facebook and Instagram pretty heavily and I go days without seeing any puppies.

It really depends on what you're trying to do with Social Media.

I tried for years to get a small business' Twitter account to take off with no success.

But I also created a personal Twitter account for political musings and it had 10 times more followers than the business account in a few months, and literally hundreds of times more engagement.

I don't think anyone is actually "good at social media" as it's constantly changing. I just think you have to take the right approach to whatever you're trying to do, and also be lucky.

It's not that different from other social endeavors. If you don't have existing social connections, meaning people don't know who you are, it's tough. If you're already "famous" you could be posting third-rate content and get decent engagement. Even if you get a few posts to go viral it doesn't help you in the big scheme of things if you cannot convert it into a relationship.

At the end of the day it's all people on the other side. Think how to get them to like YOU, not your posts.

People only have so much attention to allocate. It’s exponentially harder to become a star on social media platforms as the number of users grows. Look for the next platform that appeals to your audience & begin building while there is a vacuum to be filled.

Advertisements and referrals will magnify your reach. If you have money, buy ads. If you are famous on another platform or have access to other famous people, promote your channel via referrals. If you have a website with high search rank, link to your posts.

The only winning move is not to play.

We tend to find that our team are most interesting when they write about what they are interested in. After all, people who tend to create content to reach trending audiences often aren't writing with the same love and passion, and so what the offer is less unique. Get really into the details of what you love and you'll tend to find and connect with others who do the same and build your community that way.

What's your product ? What added value is it offering to your prospects compared to other's product ? Who are your prospects ?

I'd suggest getting your hand on a marketing 101 book or online courses, take the shortcut here by learning from others and stop trying out things at random.

And depending on your business: be prepared to shell out money in ads. Be very careful. If you don't know how then it's the time yet.

What are your goals? It’s hard to give you actionable advice without knowing what you are trying to achieve.

It sounds like you’re just copying others; that is not a good way to be good at most things that aren’t commodities (which social media is not).

Copying the techniques that you see on trending pages, without copying the (unseen) techniques that got people on trending pages will, predictably, not land you on trending pages.

don't get good at social media, get good at finding sponsors and scouts.

with this I mean, get good at finding 100 persons that either: - would pay 1 euro a month for whatever you're doing next - would happily forward infos about whstever you're doing next to that friends of theirs who is really into the same niche (who usually would love to pay 1 euro/month)

> Why is it always hate, hate and hate.

I firmly believe that being mean (spreading hate) takes much less effort than being nice. It's like curse words. It is so much easier to drop an F-Bomb than it is to a word that's more descriptive. People just gravitate towards the low effort fruit, even if it isn't nearly as delicious.

Personally I've found the way to "win" at social media is to not engage.

I left Facebook over a decade ago - as it happens because of the people not the platform - and I find myself not using Twitter at all (I'll occasionally go read a linked tweet, but its not like I need an account to do that) for months now.

Why do you care?

I'm going to take the opposite view here, and advise you that if see Social Media as full of hate (which it is in my view), then Social Media is not for you. I recommend you leave it to those who enjoy that sort of toxic interaction, and focus on something you actually enjoy.

Being good at social media is not worth much by itself. What is the actual goal? Selling something?

It seems unclear whether you approach it from a professional or an individual basis. You mention spamming the trending tags which sounds like a blackhat marketing tactic. Do you want to promote your product or to become more involved at a personal level?

Work towards a niche.

Then announce it to the world. Although getting "followers" or "retweets" as a vindication of your online presence is not a metric that should be pursued. Its futile.

You need to find your inner voice first, and your best fit? Each medium has its own population and style. Start from the one you like the most and be yourself.

There's no need to play that game and it's far more rewarding to define and play your own game with a smaller audience. I had cut myself off of social media and blogging but got back into it recently because I felt there would be an audience I could benefit: https://blog.kowsheek.com/should-i-start-a-blog/

Stop using it and get Actual Work done

Hate, feelings vs facts, false compassion, relatability and all that is part of the current bit of nature we are experiencing. Studying art, culture, religion and psychology has a lot of answers for how people behave. Ultimately a lot of the pop art and advertising is just plastering a film over what people want at the moment and pointing people in a direction from that.

Hate is running out of steam as we speak, in a few years it will all be money, humanism, unity, kindness, ect. Then it will be taste, the tall mother, class, sisterly love ect. The cycles of what the nature in people want can be tracked over days, months, years, decades, centuries, ect. People have been doing this stuff for millennia.

Hate, jealousy, ect are signals that something of value exists and is worth hating. Getting your product hated for silly reasons is a great boost, sell to both the haters and lovers. People won't tolerate inaccessible and distant rich or classy figures at the moment, all the cash and attention is in relatability. All the old symbols of competence and class have mostly collapsed (except for the old mainstays) so there's few ways to visibly distance yourself socially from others anyway.

It's all a big ecosystem that rumbles on, for all the 'individual brilliance of an artist/advertiser/designer' they are all using the same tools to do the same stuff, including the understanding of human psychology. Once you learn all the tools it becomes constraining what gets attention and what you can actually live off, it can only really be one thing, one story at the end of the day and everybody's competing for it.

oh, the whole proccess of seo is an experiment. there is no accurate formula for success, however, there are some tips and tricks.

what social media you are talking about? reddit, facebook, youtube, twitter?

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

0.0.0.0 facebook.com

0.0.0.0 twitter.com

Don't. Just don't.

Social media has proven to be a least common denominator gutter that worships outrage and chumbox spam. Either have bots make the snausage by filling the world with crap for money, or be at peace without approval in relative obscurity with worthwhile content and less money. There's not much middle-ground because it's half-stepping to not go all-in and focus one way or the other. Personally, IDGAF and would do the latter if I was forced to but don't really care what random, cyberdisinhibited people think because it's usually time-wasting noise.

Yes targeting fewer people easily show you better results in the online industry.