Practice The Social Media 80/20 Rule To Unlock A Proven Ally

In this post, we’re going to detail how the social media 80/20 rule helps you find (and focus on) what’s most important for your business.

Using this rule, you’ll be able to amplify the results from the tasks that actually matter and stop wasting time on those that don’t.

If you’re ready to dramatically improve the impact of your marketing efforts, this post is for you!

Let’s jump right in..

What Is The 80/20 Marketing Rule?

The basic definition is that 20% of your marketing efforts will typically lead to 80% of your results. 

This is illustrated by a simple 80/20 rule marketing example; for most websites, 80% of the traffic is coming to just 20% of their posts.

80/20 Myths & Misconceptions

Now let’s take a quick minute to talk about some other interpretations to the Social Media 80/20 rule, and why I feel they are missing the bigger picture. 

Some think the 80/20 rule is about social media content ratios; the way you categorize your posts by type, such as the social media rule of thirds. 

What is the social media rule of thirds?

This is the idea that your social media posts should be evenly distributed among different groups such as:

• informational (curated or your own)
• promotional or sales related
• interactive (questions, polls, etc.)

While there is some merit to posting different types of content, there are a couple problems.

First, these ratios will be different for each niche and audience. And more importantly, what matters are the results, not ratios. 

The Social Media 80/20 Rule I’m about to describe is universal.

The Social Media 80/20 Rule

This rule is about finding out which aspects of social media marketing yield the best results, and spending your time & efforts there. 

There are three main elements of social media marketing that will determine your success.

First, you’ll need to find out which platform(s) your audience uses and what times they are active. Having a presence everywhere is fine, but focus on the social networks that actually matter to your audience.

Second, the posts that get the best results use compelling titles and text, and have great images & graphic design. Put the focus on quality over quantity.

Third, the importance of having a specific branded look cannot be overstated. Develop a unique style for your business by standardizing your fonts, color palette, and post templates.

Spending the time up-front to get these key elements right creates the right foundation to effectively deploy your marketing strategy.

And this next section is how you use that foundation to build an automated marketing machine.

Automation Is Your Ally

The obvious reasons to automate your social media marketing are that you’ll save time and be able to focus on the most important aspects of your business. 

What’s often overlooked is that you’ll save additional time by being able to create posts, check analytics, and tweak posting schedules all within a single dashboard.

Your time is better spent marketing on social media without being on social media.

Choosing The Right SMM Tool

There are limitless options for social media management tools, so how do you find the right one? It just needs these 3 things:

1. The Right Networks

You’ll want a single tool, if possible, that can natively post to all of the social media networks you’re active on.

2. The Right Features

Look for things like the ability to create & preview posts, create multiple variations for evergreen content, robust scheduling, content importing, and short link integration.

3. The Right Price

Buy based on your needs now, but make sure you can scale up as your business grows. Marketing is necessary for that growth, so try to avoid basing your decision on price alone.

My Automation Strategy

I’ve been using SocialBee since 2017, and it’s been invaluable to the businesses I run.

What I’ve found most effective is to primarily create evergreen content, so it stays relevant much longer, and doesn’t require frequent updating.

For the automated marketing machine, I started by making a few content categories and giving each of them a specific posting schedule.

Then I craft a social media post (with several variations), which are added into those categories. 

On schedule, posts are randomly published from these categories, and each time a post is selected, a different variation is chosen. 

This way, I can market one post many different times before any specific variation is repeated. This keeps my social media timelines looking fresh and unique.

At this point, most of the hard work is done. The last piece of the puzzle is simply to watch the analytics, see what’s working and what isn’t, and make minor changes to my templates or schedule as needed. 

Although it does take a bit of time to get this kind of system setup, the rewards are definitely worth it.

Final Thoughts

The big takeaway with the social media 80/20 rule is that you find out what’s most important in your business, and then make that your focus.

If you make the upfront time investment to create an evergreen marketing machine, you’ll be able to spend most of your time observing the results and then making minor changes as necessary.

The more you automate, the more time you have for the things that really matter.

What about you?

Which social media tasks do you still need to automate?

Let us know by leaving a comment below.