The only way to get better at something is to practice. In the social media marketing world, this is difficult; your campaign is a running experiment, forcing you to adapt as you go and feel the consequences of the tough lessons you encounter along the way.
To solve this problem, here are some great exercises you can use to sharpen your social media skills without having to apply it to your live accounts.
1. Topics and variation
The first exercise is simple in concept but offers surprising depth when you put it into practice. The idea is to discover what’s appropriate for your target audience as well as brand voice by simultaneously finding what is inappropriate.
Here’s the exercise: Think of a general topic for a social media update. Let’s say you want to post that your brand is celebrating its five-year anniversary. Your goal is to write example posts for this in many different styles, angles, and voices.
For example, “We’re honored to have had the opportunity to spend the last five years serving our clients” is much more serious and formal than “No way! We’ve been around for five years already — come celebrate with us!” Yet both accomplish a similar objective.
Playing around with these different options will help you differentiate what is truly unique about your brand voice and what to avoid when you write your messages for real.
2. Feedback
Create a list of competitors’ social media accounts. Your job isn’t to simply read or digest their updates, but to analyze them.
What elements of their messages really work for you? What elements are unappealing? Are there any messages that stand out? What makes them stand out? Isolating these variables will help you learn to criticize your own work proactively and play the role of the average social media consumer.
3. Contrarian role-playing
Start by creating a controversial social media post, then have a co-worker, friend or even yourself play a “contrarian” role, dedicated to arguing, nitpicking and debating your stance.
Think of insightful, respectful and expert-level responses to everything the contrarian can say — and do so as quickly as possible, as if this were a live social environment.
This will help you hone your social media conversational skills and put your industry expertise to the test. The exercise works better with two people, so there’s a clear motivation to trip you up.
4. The mock disaster
All in all, social media “disasters” are pretty rare, but they can happen. If it ever happens to your brand, you need to be ready, so try running a simulation of what would happen if your brand posted something devastating.
Have a co-worker text you at a random time that they choose — preferably when it’s inconvenient for you since disaster can strike at any time. See how quickly you can round up your team, check into your social profiles for damage control and come up with a strategy for how to respond.
5. Crowdsourced opinions
This exercise requires some outside help. Gather a few team members and have them play the role of social media audience members — this is even better if you can get existing clients, but in that case, it’s less exercise and more market research.
Present multiple post alternatives you’ve already created. These could be variations on a topic, like you created in exercise one, or simply different topics that you’ve come up with while brainstorming. Have your team members collectively decide on the post they feel is best to publish, and ask them why they chose it.
Most of the previous exercises have been limited in the sense that they rely only on your perceptions and judgments; this will compensate for some of your biases.
Conclusion
These exercises aren’t perfect, and your social campaigns will still be a bit of an experiment in progress, but at least you’ll walk into them knowing you have a firm grasp on your brand identity and overall strategy.
Written by Timothy Carter.
Originally posted on marketingland.com