Tony Restell

Rather than "Engage More", I would highlight "Engage Your Team More" as the biggest lever you have to address declining social media reach. Whilst it's true that having your business engage more on social media will help to reach more people, the far bigger opportunity for most companies is to get more of your staff engaged with posting content that raises their profile and benefits the company. Look under the hood of most companies and you'll find that only a tiny fraction of employees are engaging with company content or posting themselves. That's the thing to address and the change we've seen have the biggest impact for clients.

There's sometimes a reluctance to proactively grow your network on LinkedIn (and elsewhere), as people have been on the receiving end of spammy connection approaches and salesy follow-ups. But, when done professionally, it's a powerful way of growing your network AND sparking conversations with people in the exact organisations you would aspire to securing freelancer work in. The key is to be proactively doing this in advance of needing to secure a new freelancing gig. You need to already have the relationships and to already have sparked conversations ahead of when your next need for a freelancing assignment comes around. Otherwise you start acting in desperation and come across more salesy than you'd want to for optimum results.

The first important step is recognising that social media marketing requires a significant investment of time. The second important step is figuring out what activities on social media are - and are not - worthy of investing in. Often, overwhelm comes from either not carving out enough time in your week for social media; or from allowing that time to be lost through social media distractions that take you away from the core activities you should be prioritising. For many in business, there'll be a realisation that it's better to delegate or outsource much of what needs doing on social media, so you're able to focus a more modest amount of time on just those activities where you're best placed to add value. This also avoids overwhelm.

It is worth noting that when LinkedIn changed how its groups operated a few years ago, lots of professional groups starting springing up on Facebook as a result. What this means is that, in many fields, there are some very active business-oriented groups on Facebook - covering a wide range of specialist areas and niche industries. Furthermore, Facebook groups notify members about activity in their groups more proactively than LinkedIn groups do... meaning that activity levels in Facebook groups often exceed what you might expect from a LinkedIn group. It's therefore always worth checking if there's an established Facebook group serving the niche you are most interested in. If there is, it's a great place to network & start conversations.

My advice would be to develop a social media strategy that is not dependent on the algorithm for success. If you don't need mass visibility for your strategy to work, then no change to the algorithm can derail you. This advice is borne out by research we did with 170+ B2B firms in the last months. We found that they were 6 x more likely to be generating client wins from social media if they were focused on implementing a strategy that didn't leave them exposed to changes in the algorithm. Happy to share those findings with anyone who'd find them helpful.

One of the biggest factors determining whether you have satisfied clients is whether or not you position yourself as an advisor, rather than an order-taker. Before any work has been started, you should be having a frank and open discussion about your client's desired outcomes from social media - and whether or not those are realistic. If expectations are unrealistic, you should help educate your client on what is attainable - based on similar work you've done with other clients. Most clients will value this input and will adjust their expectations accordingly - setting you both up for a favourable outcome... ... but if a client will not heed your advice, you would do better to walk away than to start a project that's doomed to fail.