🎥 Niki Hutchison on Organic Social Media

Niki Hutchison


Niki Hutchison runs a marketing agency, and also teaches entrepreneurial women how to grow their businesses and their audiences without using paid ads.

We caught up with Niki at kickstart-dublin and asked her what works with organic Facebook, what her clients are often surprised by, and what types of organic content convert best.

Find Niki at NikiHutchison.com

Testing

The thing about organic is that it is the perfect type of content to test what works and to learn before you invest any more time, effort and money into a paid strategy. So if you are thinking that Facebook ads are going to be the silver bullet, the get out of jail free card, that’s absolutely not what they are. They, to me, are the cherry on top of the cake.

Start with testing out different types of content, different formats, different themes, different topics, different ideas that you’ve had, different questions that you’ve got from people; try to get as much engagement as you possibly can with your organic content before you start putting money behind paid ads. Otherwise, you’re probably going to be paying for the wrong thing and potentially something that people are not interested in.

For example, I have three lead magnets on my website at the moment, and when I first created those a couple of months ago, we tested all three of them via my own channels, via memberships that I’m in, via earned channels, via blogs, all sorts of different ways. We tested them, and the one that performed the best was then the one that we went on to put budget behind for paid ads. And I recommend that you do that with all of your different types of content.

Effort

One of the things that my community and my clients are often surprised by is the amount of effort that you have to go to to create content that is actually going to perform well. And yes, it’s disappointing to hear, but hopefully it’s quite reassuring as well, because ultimately the more you put in—like anything in life—the more you will get out. But it’s really important to be paying attention.

I was a strategic planner within ad agencies, so a large part of my role was to conduct market research and really gather insights from the audiences of our clients. I apply the same thinking to my business, and that’s what I teach to my clients and my community as well, which is: go and explore! I call it “go detective mode.” Go detective mode; use this opportunity that organic social media presents to really test and learn what’s working, and then do it again.

Pay attention to what is not just getting the kind of half-hearted likes, but what are the things
that people are sharing? What are the things that are really starting the conversations? These are the types of content that you want to lean into, create more of, and really dedicate as much time as you can to.

I was delivering a workshop recently and somebody asked me how much time I spend creating content in my business. They were pretty horrified by my answer, which was, I have a team helping me, but between us, we spend probably three or four days a week creating content. That includes social, podcasts, newsletter, emails, etc. You definitely don’t have to do that when you’re just starting out on your content creation journey, but don’t underestimate the results that you will get if you can commit more time to creating organic content, because it really can revolutionize your business.

Conversion

Different types of organic content will convert at different rates and on different time scales.

My podcast, for example, can be quite a slow burn. Often I’ll have clients who will say, “Oh, I discovered you a few months ago: I listened to a few episodes of your podcast, I joined your Facebook community, and now I’m ready to start asking questions about how I can become your client.”

Something that I really think everybody should be leaning into in 2022 is to create your email list, because that is outperforming social media. If you can commit to a regular schedule and do that testing and learning that I mentioned before, you can work out what the members of your email list, your subscribers, what are they interested in hearing about from you.

How you can work that out is you can really challenge yourself to create more interesting subject lines so that you can then monitor the open rates, and you can challenge yourself to include different types of links inside the emails that you’re sending out so that you can then monitor which type of topics people are interested in by the links that they are clicking.

For example, I know that my email subscribers are most interested in Instagram. Any time I include a link in my emails to the latest Instagram update, I know that that is going to be the thing that people click first. And I also know that once people have become a subscriber on my email list, they are far more likely to convert into a client more quickly than they might do by listening to my podcast, for example.

It’s going to be different for everybody—it’s going to be different for you in your business than it is for me in mine. But going back to this test and learn strategy: do your research, pay attention, listen hard to what people are telling you, pay attention to the clues that they’re dropping, and you will have success with organic content.


Niki Hutchison @niki
I teach entrepreneurial women how to grow engaged audiences that power businesses. I also run my own marketing agency


Tell Us Below:

What’s working for you with organic social media?

1 Like

Organic isn’t dead! It’s alive on all platforms and I love how you spelled that out @niki . My BEST organic reach is currently on LinkedIn, and I am a service provider.

“One of the things that my community and my clients are often surprised by is the amount of effort that you have to go to to create content that is actually going to perform well. And yes, it’s disappointing to hear, but hopefully it’s quite reassuring as well, because ultimately the more you put in—like anything in life—the more you will get out. But it’s really important to be paying attention.”

^^^^^ This is so true! The more you put in, the more you get out, and creating the right content for the right audience takes skill, knowledge, creativity, data and so much more!

1 Like