3 secrets to success on social media according to Gary Vaynerchuk

With the rise of mobile shopping and conversational commerce, building a strong social media following has become an absolute must. But doing it right requires time, content, and most important of all, strategy.

Gary Vaynerchuk – prolific angel investor, best-selling author, and one of the world’s most well-known (and successful) marketers – recently joined Shopify’s TGIM podcast to share a few of his key lessons for maximizing your brand’s potential on social media.

He recommends stepping back and re-thinking your approach based on these three principles:

1. Understand how you communicate

According to Vaynerchuk:

The way you win in social, and the way you win in 2016-2018 in this digital landscape, is to understand how you communicate.

By that, he’s referring to your choice of digital media – podcasts, videos, blogging, etc.

Rather than posting whatever content they think might work best on any given platform, business owners should decide what type of content would best fit their skillset:

Are you good enough to do it in audio? Are you good enough to do it video? Are you doing it in cartoon form? Are you a great writer?

For business owners, Vaynerchuk’s advice is simple: Determine what type of content you’re best at creating, and capitalize on it.

By basing your social media strategy around sharing great content in a form that comes naturally to you, the quality and consistency of your posts can start to soar.

2. Produce content for your audience, not for yourself

Once your content begins to pay off and your follower count increases, it can be tempting to bask in your success and start straying from the path that got you there. Vaynerchuk muses:

Yeah, maybe I want to take selfies that make me look thinner or cool, but I have to deliver on why they paid attention in the first place — and that means business advice.

If you own a cosmetics business and became popular via makeup application videos on YouTube, stick to that. If you sell home accessories and curate great design photos on Instagram, keep it up.

People subscribe to social media pages in order to consume more of what they’re interested in – not you.

Avoid the temptation to deviate from content that enticed them to follow you in the first place.

3. Make it contextual to the platform

Vaynerchuk was also insistent that business owners tailor their content to the platform it’s published on.

Here are the content/social network pairings he suggested:

• Animated gifs on Tumblr
• Infographics on Pinterest
• Great photos and quote cards on Instagram
• Everything works on Facebook
• Quotes and really smart hashtag usage on Twitter

Being able to understand the nuances of each social network will allow you to better align your content with what users expect from the platform.

Or as Vaynerchuk puts it:

Understand what the person is thinking when they’re in that platform. Reverse engineer that. Use your talent of communication and that’s how you break through all the noise.