Hart & Highland

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Social Media Content Takeaways

How your audience feels about your social media matters - like a lot.

Social content that doesn’t connect means it’s just checking a box and most likely not doing a whole lot to build your brand or encourage product consideration. One of the key elements of a meaningful social strategy is knowing how you want your audience to feel when they consume your content by taking the honest human element of consumer marketing into consideration. We call these, social takeaways.

You may have heard about social content pillars or “buckets” - most people get those wrong, but that’s for another post. What I’m talking about are the feelings that you want to evoke with those topics from a post-by-post perspective as well as overall when looking at your social profile as a whole. This most definitely doesn’t mean a perfect grid on Instagram based on an exact balance of content formats and types; it means being intentional about the content.


step 1: clarify takeaways and values

  1. What are three key takeaways you want your audience to feel from a broad account perspective and individual posts? 

  2. What are three key values that define your brand? 


We can’t be everything to everyone - be everything for the right people. THAT’S OK.


step 2: get some outside perspective

List 3 brands that you admire and feel do a great job communicating who they are by speaking to their audience on social media. 

  1. What do you feel when looking at their profile?

  2. What makes you love their content?

  3. Which of their posts are resonating best with their audience?


step 3: mini social audit

Go to your social account and ask yourself these three questions:

  1. What is the personality of your social account (bio and posts overall) in five words or less?

  2. How would a stranger describe your account to their friend if they only had 30 seconds to look at your profile?

  3. Why would someone benefit from following you?


Final Thoughts:

  1. If you don’t feel elated about the findings. Change it. Throw away any sense of sunk costs from past strategies.

  2. Social is a living thing - we call it “organic” for a reason. 

  3. Being on-trend isn’t the point; being relevant is.

  4. You have 7 seconds at most to make a first impression (good or bad). Make it count.


Written by Arica Rosenthal

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