Arguably, one of the most important attributes anyone working in social media can have is curiosity.
With each passing day, the number of people, brands and businesses posting on social media increases massively, not only making the sheer volume of content online excessive, but also making every trend, every niche and every corner of the internet incredibly saturated.
In other words, standing out online is not as simple as it looks.
There are two major qualities required for social media success nowadays:
A very specific need for speed.
A fearless passion for innovation and creativity.
To set trends, you have to take risks. To take risks, you have to think broadly, ask a whole load of “what if?”s and be quick off the bat to act.
So, what does this look like in action?
For Truffle, it looks like this: a team of naturally inquisitive individuals constantly looking to understand the nuances and variables that make social media what it is and produce tangible results at any given moment.
This “always-on” approach, coupled with a willingness to take leaps of faith and experiment in our work, is what places us in the prime position to get ahead of the game.
Having the courage and innovation-led approach to consciously stray away from the typical “guidelines'' is what will help you and your team reach that same position. Brands that truly want to make waves online should shun posting for the sake of posting in pursuit of the bigger priority — posting with purpose, thereby posting with impact.
True creativity doesn’t always fit — in fact, shouldn’t always fit — within the rigid structures of a scope of work. It’s sometimes those small extra bits you do to go above and beyond that make all the difference.
Social media is a hub for a lot of things nowadays, namely:
It’s where all the biggest conversations happen.
It’s where relationships are built.
It’s where ideas are born, developed and distributed.
If you’re not spearheading trends and racing to the forefront of those conversations, you’re not getting the most out of what social media has to offer, which is a fast-track ticket to irrelevance.
We’ve all seen it a million times — brands failing to jump on trends and cater to customers’ needs and desires, ultimately leading to their demise.
Think Yahoo, Blockbuster, Nokia… All classic cases of businesses that tragically missed bandwagons and promptly boarded the #fail trains into obscurity.
Yahoo missed their chances to purchase Google and Facebook by being too slow to act.
Nokia failed to evolve its model to keep up with the rise of smartphones.
Blockbuster couldn't keep up with Netflix’s transition to DVDs and eventually streaming services.
A more literal example in the world of social media? MySpace, which didn’t evolve its user interface quickly enough to compete with Facebook, meaning it inevitably plummeted headfirst into an internet graveyard.
So, the trick to making your brand stand out in the ocean of content consumed by your audience is simple.
Don’t limit yourself to solely thinking within the realms of what is currently working and trending.
Tap into your creativity, take a risk or two and experiment. After all, social media is still a very new phenomenon in the grand scheme of things — there are a million different ways to use it that haven’t been attempted yet.