How to Avoid Social Media FOMO and Build a Scaling Strategy

Social media marketing is one of the pillars of digital marketing in this day and age. Business owners and brand managers may feel left behind if they feel that they are lacking in any one social media channel. One way to avoid social media FOMO is by designing an intentional scaling strategy. 

Digital marketing expert Alessio Pieroni shares his insights on building a scaling strategy in his new book, Exponential Marketing. Alessio, who is the founder of the highly successful Scale for Impact digital marketing agency, former CMO of Mindvalley, and creator of the Scale Series, knows a thing or two about scaling up. 

Alessio points out that you can’t scale up your business just by focusing on one unique channel. You need to build different channels in order to create a solid marketing approach and prepare your business to scale beyond any new technologies. 

Here is the extract from Pieroni’s book Exponential Marketing with the tips on scaling up your social media strategy will eliminate FOMO and help you to grow your brand on a variety of channels. 

Don’t think social media is just a game. Even thinking it’s just a pastime for Generation Z kids (those born with social media) is an unforgivable mistake. Social media is for everyone and in social media you find everyone.

How many times have you heard the owner or marketing director of a company give this monologue, in a crescendo of panic and FOMO (the fear of missing out on something important)?

After all, it’s understandable to fall into confusion and way too easy to make the classic mistake (90% of companies do it): trying to be everywhere, and thereby not being anywhere.

How does it work instead? You need to follow this flow:

1 – Choose your reference social medium.

2 – Define the metrics and goals to pursue.

3 – Apply Growth Hacking. 

4 – Achieve your goals. 

• Choose YOUR reference social network

My advice is to focus on a single social medium. In the meantime, forget the others. It is a waste to invest resources to create content for social networks where you only have a few followers or a low engagement.

• Define the metrics and goals to pursue

Once you’ve chosen which social medium to land on, focus becomes key. Don’t be tempted by other social networks (FOMO) but focus on just this one. First, explore how the platform works: its features, rules and limitations, mechanisms and best practices to grow the profile, the tricks you can put in place to maximize the investment.

• Apply growth hacking

Growth Hacking is a circular process of experimentation. It starts with brainstorming which is the identification of ideas for your strategy. One of the easiest ways to do this is to study your competitors’ strategies.

Brainstorming is followed by prioritizing the ideas to be tested, to be carried out by following the ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) method. From here you can start testing.

Basically, the tests you’ll be running on social media are those that allow you to understand which content you post generates the highest engagement: engagement you’re going to measure upon certain metrics.

You’ll need to perform (and measure) a rich and continuous backlog of ideas and tests in order to make your decisions in the most data-driven way possible.

On social media, as on all platforms, your tests must have a North Star Metric as a reference which will generally be represented by engagement and growth. In fact, it is engagement that allows you to move your client’s brand towards the goals they seek.

• Reach your goals

Once you understand the value of growth metrics and health metrics, you’re then going to move onto the actual endeavor of publishing and managing social media. The focus is on creating a content strategy that works but is at the same time consistent with the brand’s guidelines.

Once you’ve achieved your goals after a few months of experimentation, you’ll theoretically have become a “master” of the client’s social media you’ve worked on. 

How to organize your team for scaling up 

Choosing which social network to be active in, determines the type of resources you need. The first resource to find is the social platform manager. With this person, you’ll need to decide on the growth and health metrics you’ve identified and then set your goals with them. At this point, they will know what direction to take and what actions to undertake in order to reach success.

As your social presence grows, the team needs to grow as well. As the demand for content increases, you’ll soon find you need a copywriter who specializes in writing scripts or a cross-platform transition specialist.

Before scaling up your team, it will be useful to understand if the social networks you use are:

– Feed oriented (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram): the user scrolls through their feed and the goal of your content is to draw their attention in the shortest possible time.

– Search oriented (YouTube, Pinterest, Quora): they work as search engines and your goal is to make the information you publish, easily findable

Above all, you need a team leader who has to make sure that the communication on social media is always consistent with the company line and feel and at the same time he/she also needs to have a full overview of this complex puzzle.

When you’ve created your dream team, consisting of the right mix of creative personalities, techies and marketing experts, you’re ready to scale up.