Welcome back to Owned. This week we’re talking about deciphering how to win on socials.

Maybe Substack will be the next big thing, maybe it’ll be Threads (lol).

Whatever it ends up being, the principles for winning on social are the same everywhere.

Last time we talked about how to choose which platform to prioritise, this week we talk about making a plan.

Lets dive in.

Regardless of the platform, the way you build engagement on social media is by giving people something of value.

Posting on social media often feels cringe, one of the ways to make that easier is to post stuff you think will genuinely be helpful for people.

Aim for 80% of what you post to provide value without asking for anything in return. For the remaining 20%, still provide value, but give people a next step.

(You may notice I’ve struggled to keep this ratio recently. I got sloppy, let my focus slip and my engagement cratered as a result. As soon as I shifted back to focusing on value, things started to improve.)

Hook, body and call-to-action: the anatomy of social media

For all of their differences, social posts across all platforms have the same 3 essential components.

The hook is the way that they grab your attention. On YouTube this is the combination of headline and thumbnail, on Instagram it’s the image. On LinkedIn it’s those weird “my cat died, here’s what that taught me about B2B sales”.

The body is the ‘meat’ of the content itself, maybe it’s a story, a listicle, or outlining an upcoming event. This can provide the value itself, or set the context for the call to action to follow.

The call-to-action is what the reader is directed to do as a result of reading. You can think of it as the goal of the post in the first place. This might be a line telling you to sign up today, a question to answer in the comments, or a request to share.

Going back to our 80/20 rule above, a value-focused post might not have an explicit call to action, but across all platforms any post basically everything will follow this structure.

As you consume social media, news, even ads on TV and tube carriages, with a little practice you should be able to identify each of the components. Getting into the habit of doing this makes it easier to identify what will or won’t work on a given platform, and will ultimately make your content better.

Don’t chase the wrong growth

Last month I went to a drinks event and got talking to a guy who runs a successful agency. He’s grown his personal audience to hundreds of thousands, and regularly generates millions of impressions.

However, someone asked him what had allowed him to start reaching those numbers, and he answered that he had stopped talking about topics specific to his audience and instead focused more on wider work culture topics (remote vs in-person work, that sort of thing).

“It’s a bit of a double-edged sword to be honest,” he added. “My [socials] are better for hiring now, but no good for bringing in business.”

All followers are not created equal. If you focus on simply getting to the biggest number, your content will drift towards being generic. Stay on message.

You don’t know what will take off

There’s a quote from (I believe) Professor Dean Simonton that sums up early social media strategy well: “Creativity is a probabilistic consequence of productivity”.

Evidently, professors can’t get away with just saying you need to throw a lot of s**t at the wall and see what sticks.

Case in point, here are the impressions from 2 posts of mine, posted days apart from one another earlier this year.

Post 1 - about a month ago:

Post 2 (about 3 days later):

No difference in effort, no special strategy, both about content strategy in different ways.

The point is this: to begin with, you will have very little knowledge of what works or doesn’t. You’re going to have to publish a lot before you have a good sense of what your audience wants.

Make sure everything is in line with your messaging, but don’t be afraid to experiment widely early on, and focus on posting consistently rather than on the success of any one post.

Give the people algorithm and platform what they want

Assuming you’re already doing your best to keep your audience happy, you also want to keep the algorithm and the platform happy.

The algorithm just means the way that the platform chooses whether or not to show a post to more people. Learn the formats and idiosyncrasies that can help or harm your reach, and tailoring your posts accordingly.

For example: LinkedIn will (supposedly) downrate the reach of a post if it includes a link to an external platform, and may show it to more people if you include an image or emojis.

The algorithm can be capricious and changes regularly, so these are more tactical tweaks and should be revisited regularly.

Any platform worth its salt has a seemingly endless stream of people posting about what is currently working, so your best bet is usually to gather a few recent updates, cross reference the commonalities and then check it against what you see in your own content.

The platform is the company running the social media platform itself. This will have its own priorities, and the more you can align what you’re doing with what they want, the better you’re likely to do.

Make sure you follow the platform on the platform itself, along with any community blogs or newsletters they publish. They usually run regular webinars/events too. All can be a useful source of insight into what the platform wants.

Look at what’s already working

Chances are, if your audience is on a platform, there are companies and influencers that are popular with them. These people and companies offer a shortcut to developing your own approach.

Each platform has its own tools that help you to identify the right people. For LinkedIn Taplio does a good job, while for Instagram, X and parts of the media Buzzsumo is the go-to tool. Not to mention, searching your key topics on the platform in question will usually give you a good idea of where to start.

Make a list of the biggest accounts and review them, asking yourself:

Start with people in your own niche, but don’t be afraid to look outside of that to other areas for inspiration.

Advanced: strategy by analogy

Once you have enough of an idea about what works on your given platform, you can begin to look outside of it for inspiration.

Success in owned media tends to come when someone masters one particular platform and builds off of that. Maintaining their position typically relies on heavy focus on that platform.

This means that every time a new platform takes off, it creates an opportunity for new leaders.

Look at the dominant players in your niche on other platforms, then ask yourself what would have change about their channel to make it native to your chosen platform.

You shouldn’t start here: If you tried to recreate MrBeast on LinkedIn, you’re just going to end up doing a lot of stuff that doesn’t suit LinkedIn. Doing this right requires first building some understanding of how to win on the platform in question.

Finally: review, but not too soon

I’ve mentioned the rule of 100 before; you won’t know whether or not your content is working straight away, and the hardest part may be persevering long enough for patterns to start to emerge.

If you can stay disciplined, the general consensus is to revisit and review your content after every 100 posts.

Look at the commonalities between the top 10% in terms of performance (hooks, topics, time they were posted, things like that) and tweak your approach so the next 100 look more like the top 10%.

Incorporate small experiments in format, hooks, subject matter and so on into each post to ensure you don’t become stale, and over time continually revisit your all-time top 10%.

Without question, the most throughtful writer about social media (perhaps not the deepest field, but she’s definitely ace) is Rachel Karten. She runs Link in Bio, a Substack newsletter about social media.

This week I thought I’d share three of the best pieces she’s published lately (a subscription may be required, in which case drop me a note and I’ll forward you the relevant edition).

What did you like about this week’s newsletter? What did you hate? Please hit reply and let me know!

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