Originally published by Gary Vaynerchuk on LinkedIn: 2017 KEY TO SMALL BUSINESS SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Here’s my 2017 New Year’s resolution to you: I want you to focus on your organic social media reach for the next year. As we wrap up 2016, I’ve been reviewing my core strategy for my personal brand and why it matters for all of my clients, small business friends, contemporaries, and others putting out branded content. Over the past year, I got really serious about putting out content on YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, and, most recently, Instagram as they introduced new platform features.
Take a look at this Google Trends chart:
This is what you see when you type in “Gary Vaynerchuk.”
A lot happened this year with my personal brand. But, what’s most fascinating to me is the minimal amount of money I put behind paid advertising. Yes, I put money behind some YouTube pre-rolls and paid for the amplification of some Facebook video, but not to the levels of what the majority of you spend (or would spend) to see big results.
When you start to really understanding what social media is today (in 2016) and where it’s going in 2017, you start realizing that social media is just the slang term for the current state of the internet.
Here’s the key statement: In 2017, if you are a business or organization of any kind that wants to be heard in the world, refocusing on the content you put out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Linkedin, Medium, and whatever else has the market’s attention at the time, is a huge factor.
For the last two to three years, people have dismissed organic content because of the rise of paid advertising. And yes, paid social media has enormous upside and incredible and, in my opinion, is the best deal in all of advertising (aside from advertising during the Super Bowl). However, what has emerged in the paranoia of everyone thinking social media only works when you spend money, is a lack of hustle and a lack of understanding that great content, especially when amplified in subtle ways, can be unbelievably effective.
What I mean by “amplified in subtle ways” is that, for example, if you just start using the proper hashtags on Instagram, you can easily start being discovered over time. Whether you’re a local pizza shop or a car dealership, or an artist, or rapper, or a Fortune 500 B2B company, using hashtags is an unbelievably organic way to hit discoverability and create amplification for your content. And if you have paid media dollars, even just spending $100-300 a week on the amplification of your YouTube and Facebook video content, it can make your content explode.