What are the ingredients of a great social media post?

I recently did an interview with Michael MacArthur, Director of Qld Data & Fibre Industries, for our book on Australian marketing. QDFI are specialists in the fibre-optic and data communications industry.

Michael had one great anecdote to share, regarding his best use of social media. It involved taking advantage of someone else’s mistake.

“We were called up to the university to repair a fibre. An excavator had gone through it, cut through a big cable for the uni. The guy driving the excavator had used these things called “scotchloks” to try to fix it, hoping no-one would notice. You put two wires in and pair them together – which works fine with copper – but fibre isn’t copper, it’s glass. Just pairing them together doesn’t work. We took photos of what he’d done, put it on Facebook and LinkedIn, and got more hits and comments out of that than anything else. We got a lot of interest out of that – it was someone else’s stuff-up. He clipped it together and thought nobody would notice – but all of their telephones and networks in four buildings went off the air.”

So what’s the marketing lesson we can take away from Mike’s example? I’d suggest it’s to be creative when looking for opportunities to create engaging content. Instead of just plugging their own capabilities, Mike and his team showed how NOT to do it. Note they weren’t attacking a competitor. In fact they didn’t even mention the name of the company that employed the excavator. They stayed very polite while still telling a good story.

And that’s what a content marketing strategy (which is really what a large part of a social media strategy is) should do – tell great stories that are relevant to your audience.

by Cameron Reilly