I am sure at some point in your life you have sat down and created a budget. If you haven’t done a budget yourself, you at least familiar with the idea. In essence, you figure out how much money you make a month and then you begin to calculate where your money goes and where it should go. When all is said and done, you’ve created a nice strategy for spending your money wisely.
Social media requires just as much budgeting preparation as your finances. When you are creating posts and coming out with content to spread across your blog, Twitter or Facebook, your readers are expecting to reap certain insights and gain knowledge from the content you create. The reason someone follows you comes from a direct interest in the topics you discuss. In order to increase your Twitter followers and Facebook fans while maximizing interaction, you must be consistent and creative.
A social media budget simply consists of determining what your audience wants to hear from you and catering to it. Let’s use a motivational speaker on leadership as an example. Let’s say that the majority of this individual’s followers listen to the motivator’s content because it provides valuable insight into leading a team. Now let’s also say that the speaker is an avid Chicago Cubs fan, additionally he/she is in a book club, loves reality TV shows and on the side dabbles in the tasting and reviewing of fine wines.
This is a rather common scenario. Most people have a wide array of interests and often love to tweet, blog or post about all of them, which is okay, but it needs to be done in moderation. Enter, a social media budget.
So let’s take our example’s interests: leadership, Chicago Cubs baseball, books/reading, reality TV and fine wines. Now on social media, let’s say you get $100 to work with or 100%. What you want to do to maximize your effectiveness is to budget out what content you spread but more importantly what content your readers want to hear. So in our example’s case, the majority of his followers are following him for his insights on leadership, some for the books he reads and for his wine tasting critiques, but few follow him based on his other interests. So below is a proposed budget:
- 70% Leadership (You can even break this down into original content on leadership, quotes on leadership, etc.)
- 12% Reading
- 8% Fine Wines
- 5% Other News
- 3% Cubs Fan
- 2% Reality TV
That’s a social media budget. You simply break down what you want to talk about and compare it to what your listeners want to hear. From there, you come up with a proposed budget. Like any budget, you might have to reevaluate it several times before you get into a groove. By moderating the amount you talk about certain topics, you are increasing the likelihood that people will follow you in the first place and you are insuring that your current followers will stick around because they are getting the content they want. Happy budgeting!