The importance of connecting in COVID-19

Today is my first day back working in the 55 comms office. I’ve been working from home the last two months so I could be available as a caretaker to my grandmother. She moved in with my family and I after her health deteriorated considerably during isolation and she didn’t want to go to a home and be away from family. We were more than happy to step up and be with her until she sadly passed last Monday.

When reflecting on the last two months, I get wound up in the memories of Nanna – happy, sad, funny – but I often think about how grateful I am that I didn’t have the stress of rigid working conditions to deal with. Serious health situations never go to plan so it’s hard to communicate with your boss when you expect you’ll return to work. Fortunately, Nanna survived longer than we expected but I never dealt with any stress from my work when having to communicate those changes.

My family isn’t the only one with a COVID story. While Queensland has enjoyed more freedom than Victoria, it doesn’t mean others throughout our workday aren’t struggling because of COVID. The working world is operating in a very stressful and emotional space and connecting with people’s emotions at this time is more important than ever before. I want to detail a few tips for people in business on how to stay connected with the emotions of people you work with – whether it’s customer, employee, or boss.

Connecting to emotional cues is the critical starting point in a lot of businesses. We often connect emotional cues to “needs”, so think of it as an extension of someone’s needs.

What does the customer need? Identify their problem.

At this point, take it one step further and connect it to an emotion the customer is either directly or indirectly giving you. Do they sound frustrated, angry, annoyed? Or do they sound like they’re in a rush or stressed?

From here, you can adjust your approach and handle the customer with more understanding. Something as small as fixing someone’s printer might mean they can finally finish a time-sensitive project. That relief coupled with your help will keep that customer coming back.

A different situation could be something similar to me – I’m an employee faced with a difficult family situation. We all share one common connection and that’s “family”, so work taking stress off me for being absent while also providing me with support, meant I could focus on what was most important to me. We often connect emotion to work that typically involves emotions, but with COVID continuing to cause problems, it’s worth applying this to everything.

There’s another angle to connecting emotions that is a little less clear and that’s the connection people have to your personal brand. A lot of businesses have fallen over thanks to COVID, but the little work that still exists is going to those businesses who have an emotional connection with that person/personal brand behind the business.

Defining qualities to help you develop this as a team or individual are:

• Being trustworthy, people know they can count on you to deliver

• You’re communicating clearly and earnestly, especially if problems arise

• Provide a unique element, what makes different from the rest? Do you own a bakery and deliver the goods yourself? Something along those lines is a good unique element.

• Lastly, be pleasant to deal with. If you’re comfortable for people to deal with then you’re far more likely to earn their time or business. All four of these factors will help develop a personal brand that will connect with people’s emotions.

This topic could be explored extensively, but ultimately comes down to simply tuning in to the emotions of the people you’re dealing with and deciding how best to react to that emotion.

We’re emotional beings who yearn to feel understood – so keep these tips in mind as you continue to move forward with your work.

How to share insights on social media

Struggling for good content ideas for social media? It's a common issue. But there's one option sitting right in front of you: share useful information with your audience. Yes, this information often comes from somewhere else and isn’t unique, and there’s a good chance a portion of your audience have already seen that material. But there is a way to share information in a way that is unique to your business and helps establish you as a thought and opinion leader: share your original and helpful insights on the material. Learning how to create your insights with your content rather than simply relaying existing information is critical to standing out on social media today.

Say, for example, you run a social media account that focuses on the technology industry, and a new industry development has just been released which has flooded social media and blogs with the same announcement and information. What experience, knowledge and understanding can you apply to this information? How can you look at this from a different angle and build your own piece of content from this? Don’t be mistaken, looking at this differently doesn’t mean you need to ignore the critical details of the original information – include that. But tell your audience what YOU think, start offering your original thoughts and opinions. Here’s how to start doing that …

Connect the dots 

A great way to create insights is to apply an experience from your past. Say I want to make a point that young employees really source the feeling of job security from consistent affirmation from their employer/boss. Instead of explaining how this is true through a bunch of statements, I could call on my own personal experiences with this topic and tell a story that supports my point. I’ve had three professional jobs as a young adult, one where I was left to fend for myself and another where I felt well supported. Both, however, surprised me when they ended sooner than I was ever anticipating and I couldn’t help but wish my employer had given me some indications that I wasn’t doing enough or that it was coming time for them to make a change. Now, in my third job, that consistent affirmation has made an enormous difference. My relationship with my employer feels less tiered, I feel like I know where I stand in the workplace, and the amount of worry and stress that takes off my mind as a young adult navigating the working world, is significant. Storytelling is important and that’s something we focus on a lot at 55comms – statements are boring, stories deliver insights.

Connect the people 

I’d like to challenge that ‘thinking outside of the box’ is a realistic possibility. From our mid-teens, were essentially wired with a mental framework that persists throughout our lives, so therefore, ‘thinking outside of the box’ is more about ‘combining boxes’ (or combining mental frameworks), to build new ideas. Put short, go talk to people and build ideas together. A good way to understand this process is to consider when you arrive at some information you can’t create your own insight from. What I’d suggest next is go and talk to people about it – see what thoughts, opinions and ideas they can share and see if one of them might spark something within you. This process of bouncing ideas off one another more often leaves you with a head full of new possibilities and dots to connect. Connecting these dots is what becomes your insights.

Connect the experience 

The human experience is something we all share, but share in entirely different ways. Our insights, therefore, are all entirely different. It’s really easy to explain as well, and we’ll use University as an example. A university is trying to work out whether or not they continue to offer their courses online once the COVID-19 pandemic is over, but they aren’t sure the amount of time and resources is being matched by the student output. Rather than draw a line through it, the university could invite students to share their study journey through COVID-19 and learn about hey they found adjusting to online-only in the first place. From there, they might find that most students realised they prefer this more flexible way of study – it allowed them to work a job to support their family, or to pay bills, or found they were more productive at home, or that their mental health improved. Connecting this experience with the original point mean it is now an incredibly valuable insight.

Connect the content 

The news is full of interesting content and each morning you can pluck from it what inspires or interests you. A great exercise is to debate these news pieces and create some new insights. A popular topic in news at the moment is a lady in Victoria who was turned away at Bunnings because she refused to wear a face mask. It’s easy to debate this issue because people either agree or disagree, but if you dissect it some more, you’ll discover a few different angles – is there a health issue at play, where is she sourcing her information from to begin with, who is she surrounded by and do they support her choice, was Bunning’s ‘out of line’ to deny her entry and enforce the mask policy? All these questions can be debated and a lot of insight will come from those discussions.

To finish …

 Social media content today is often very ‘safe’ in that it’s tips and tricks, or the on-sharing of an existing article written by someone else. What content today is lacking is originality and insight and that’s derived from personal experience and knowledge, as well as the curiosity and desire to want to explore these topics beyond the headline. I encourage everyone to go beyond the information you see in your feed, discover your own point of view and share that insight with your audience – they’ll thank you for it!

Five ideas to snap creativity block

For some businesses, coming up with content ideas is tough. They shouldn't worry - it’s a common problem for anyone with social media account.

COVID-19 and all of its ups and downs have provided businesses with something to talk about for a few months, but as restrictions begin to gradually lift, I’ve noticed a lot of businesses feel a bit lost or perhaps uninspired. Sure it’s exciting that you can potentially re-open, but it’s been a stressful extended period, and maybe those creative juices just aren’t flowing yet. Well I’m here to help get them flowing again - here’s five quick and easy content ideas to help break your creativity block.

1. Turn a blog post into a video

Blogs are a great content tool for both your social media and website, but video is still the most popular form of content people consume, so why not share your blog (or something specific within your blog) via video? For example - 55 comms' Michael Crutcher often talks about the importance of a business understanding its personality and could explain this really nicely in a blog piece. But posting this as a click-through link on social media might not grab that audience attention strongly enough and then that value is lost. However, if we promoted this blog piece with this video of Michael then that blog is more likely to see more reads and that value provided has been consumed further. Essentially it’s a fresh way to share something you may have been doing routinely.

2. Go Live

I always believed that it’s extremely powerful to constantly share your knowledge and opinions on matters that relate to your industry and audience, particularly if you hope to be considered an industry leader. A great way to do this is to go LIVE on social media. Facebook and Instagram make it so easy to live stream across your social media platforms, yet it’s grossly under-utilised. If you’ve just released a new product, go live and tell your audience in real-time about it, let them ask questions and answer them in real-time. If there’s been a delay in shipping or deliveries, go live and reassure your customers that it’ll all be okay. The added bonus to going live is that is really help build and strengthen your social media community by providing important and relevant information as it happens and allowing the customers to communicate with you in real-time.

3. Interview someone

Let’s not get this confused, don’t just interview anyone … but someone relevant to your business or industry would make for a very interesting piece of content. For example, if you own a book store - interview an author of a book who’s just been put on your shelf. It’s a great promotional tool for the author, for you and your book shop - and it’s far more interesting than simply posting the book cover on social media. An interview can also be converted into a blog piece which would be a great piece for your website. We’ve used the interview content idea a fair bit recently, most notably with Broncos CEO Paul White over Zoom.

4. Curate user-generated content

There’s no better way to get your audience enthusiastic about engaging with your brand than by sharing the content they make using your product. Clothing brands have used this content idea forever, but who’s to say other industries or businesses can’t adopt this method too? A great example would be a business that makes cookware - start up a hashtag that your audience can tag their posts with and scour through to find all the meals people are making with your cookware - and then share the best of it on your social media. This content really works and I couldn’t recommend it enough.

5. Organise a social contest

If you’re a business that’s lucky enough to starting doing business again, then definitely consider a social contest. This content idea is a great way to generate some major buzz around your business and that’s certainly what a lot of businesses will be hoping for as they open their doors again. A great example to help explain would be a bar or restaurant - start a contest that will reward a lucky few customers if they secure a booking in your first two weeks of opening. The prize could be something as 20 per cent off their bill, or you could announce the win online as something like a free dinner or dessert - it’s entirely up to you. Nonetheless, social media contests have always worked well for a variety of businesses, have a think about it.

And there you have it, five quick and easy content ideas that hopefully help kick-start those creative engines. Have fun.

Making social media groups work for business

Social media groups are continuing to grow in popularity as users look for more authentic ways to connect online with other like-minded people. Traditionally, social media groups are created and managed by people, for people, around a specific interest or service – this could be a suburb, community, sports team, buy/swap/sell. But in recent times, business pages have started to adopt social media groups as a new method of engaging their audiences – one that’s more authentic and personal, and where the benefit is two-way.

Before I outline the benefits, it’s important to note that you’ll need to invest a decent amount of time and effort into building and managing your group to really realise the benefits. I’m not saying you’ll have to hire an entirely new person to do the job, but it needs to be considered for its own content alongside your page’s content. 
Now, the benefits…

Gathering Useful Audience Insights
There’s a lot you can gain from observing the conversations in your group – the group is essentially your own listening tool. To help in your ongoing efforts to continually provide your audience with the best value possible, read through your group as often as possible – read the comments, the questions, the posts.

All of this is valuable information that businesses can respond to. That response could be in the form of a group discount code, a new product, a quicker support reply. This information could also form the foundation of your next marketing campaign. 

Building Relationships
Your social media group is a perfect opportunity to reveal a more human side to your business by having more one-on-one conversations with group members. Consumers often feel that communicating with a business lacks that “human” feel, that there is likely to be a robot or that you’ll be met with extensive hold times before you reach a human on the other end. But groups are a great way for businesses to remove that and instead develop those important consumer relationships. It’s also wonderful for improving trust and strengthening that sense of community amongst consumers. 

New Content Ideas
This is an extension of the first benefit I mentioned but worth expanding on. Through the constant observation of the discussions in your group, you’ll learn more about what your consumers need and want and this can help you develop new content ideas. These new content ideas are GOLD because you already know it’s responding to the needs and wants of your consumers, which you could assume would be consistent with your wider audience outside of the group. Plus, it makes your group (audience) feel heard, which is really important. 

Networking Opportunities
This may or may not be something that fits with your business model, but for those it does, groups offer a unique opportunity to network. Connecting with customers, connecting with other brands, connecting with different professionals in the same industry, or creating cross-industry connections - all of this is positive!

If you’d like to have a look at some brands/businesses who are nailing social media groups, check out any of the following: 

            • Instant Pot: https://www.facebook.com/groups/InstantPotCommunity/
            • Gold’s Gym: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheGoldsGymChallenge/
            • National Geographic: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2121020774841090/
            • Elementor: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Elementors/
            • HubSpot Academy: https://www.facebook.com/thehubspotacademy/

Social media groups will only continue to increase in popularity so it’s worth considering if it fits for your business. For some businesses it isn’t necessary, but for others, it’s a great opportunity waiting to happen.

Broncos coach: The power of living in the present

Brisbane Broncos coach 

For the rest of this remarkable NRL season, the Broncos have to borrow the thinking of one of Australia’s greatest cricketers.

Matthew Hayden was good for so many reasons including the way he focused his mind when he was batting in matches. For Matt, the most important thing was the next ball he would face. It wasn’t the ball that he may have just hit for four. Or the ball that took the edge of his bat and was dropped by a fielder.

Matt stayed in the present, worrying only about that next ball and how he would handle it. He didn’t dwell on the near misses or the moments of joy. They had no bearing on that next ball unless he let them in.

The players who dwell on the bad moments are those that don’t play to their potential. That’s one of the things we’ve been focusing on at the Broncos as we prepare for the resumption of the NRL season tonight.

We have 18 consecutive matches coming up without a break before the finals – no team in Broncos history has been asked to play so many weekends straight. Whether we play more games after that depends on how we perform in those 18 matches.

During the break, I have been in regular video meetings with Australian cricket coach Justin Langer, Crusaders rugby union coach Scott Robertson and Melbourne Demons AFL coach Simon Goodwin.

We’ve swapped ideas, picking the insights from each other’s sports to bring into our own teams.

Justin Langer’s description of Hayden – his former opening batting partner – hit the mark for me before our squad returned to training for tonight’s game against Parramatta.

We’re coming into this game with a 2-0 win-loss record before the season was put on hold. We’ve also been reminded plenty of times by journalists that Parramatta thrashed us the last time we played.

Those two factors should have no bearing on this game, unless you let your brain think otherwise. And the brain is more likely to remember bad experiences before it recalls the times of triumph.

As a coaching staff, we try to help our players with the present while disarming the past. If you can’t let go of the past, whether it be last week’s win or last week’s loss, you cannot perform to your best.

In life, everyone makes errors. The error becomes a mistake if you dwell on it and provide the brain with negative thoughts that enable it to happen again.

There are more mental factors at play than usual as we negotiate a season with its many new restrictions for NRL players and coaches. Right now, we can basically go from home to training and back again, with the highlight of the week perhaps a trip to the shops for essential items.

We have to pay that tax now but the reward is significant – the chance to feature in the resumption of major team sport in the southern hemisphere.

When we meet Parramatta, there are plenty of things we can’t control: the recent rule changes; the change to one referee; and how Parramatta has prepared.

But we can control how we have prepared and whether we’re going to stay in the present and focus on what’s coming our way.

This is a time for resilience and it’s a time for excitement. We can’t wait to play again.

Why Zoom has become a COVID star

We are in this unfamiliar world where physical interaction is restricted and craved. It’s truly bizarre, our normal day-to-day interactions are now feeling like things we took for granted. Social media is bound to keep us connected, yet many around the world feel completely isolated. For social media apps it has presented a truly unprecedented opportunity - a problem looking for a solution: how can we keep people connected online better than before? All the major social media apps have seen a tremendous spike in usage as people look for ways to fill their empty days. But one social media company has really come to notice from seemingly nowhere – Zoom. The video-chat program has been around since 2011 and operates much like Skype, a video chat solution for business meetings, a way for friends and family apart to connect in real-time. But why has Zoom become the app of the pandemic? Why not the others, like Skype or Microsoft Teams? And will it survive post-pandemic? I’ve been researching this topic, let me explain: 

Why has Zoom become the app of the pandemic?
This is simple – integration, reliability and popularity. The main reason for Zoom’s success is its simple integration into every users’ online activity. There is an option for a free account that boasts enough features to make the app plenty useful, and there’s a paid version that lifts certain limitations placed on a free account. The simple integration into online activity and social media in particular has generated rapid word-of-mouth and quickly become the recommended tool online when people wanted to connect. Equally vital to the app’s success is its reliability. CEO Eric Yuan placed enormous significance on the app’s ability to handle volume – his knowledge as a software engineer from his previous role as corporate vice president of engineering at Cisco helped this. As the pandemic began closing down businesses, employees started to use the program to conduct business meetings from home. Eventually, universities and schools adopted the app to keep some class schedules on track. Then gyms, musicians, celebrities – suddenly, it was THE way to connect. And Zoom responded to the increased use offering institutions, organisations, businesses free access in an ongoing effort to keep businesses alive. And it really worked – before you knew it, Zoom was everywhere. 

Why not the others, like Skype or Microsoft Teams?
This question sparked my interest in this topic to begin with because I grew up using Skype, and having used Zoom now, I did wonder. Fundamentally, they’re the same, so why did they miss out? A lot of the Zoom success can be attributed to the fact that for a lot of people it was a new app, and new usually means people want to investigate. That first experience with Zoom is really pleasant – if, for example, you’re using Zoom for the first time to talk with a client, you’re simply given a link and a meeting password – visit the link, enter the password, voila, you’re away. With Skype and Teams the feedback isn’t as complimentary – it’s a longer setup, you need an existing account, the process is slower and less fluid. Another important feature was the various customisations in Zoom which could make your appearance unique to others in the meeting. Changing backgrounds was a fun feature included in Zoom that was a common meme on social media, all the more drawing attention to the app. There were some reported security concerns that gained mainstream media coverage and prompted some large organisations to order staff off Zoom. But that could be weighed against the critical reliability issue faced by Skype, Teams and others, particularly when experiencing increased volume. Skype and Teams in particular documented reports of crashes in light of COVID-19 as the mass influx of users looked to connect. Simply being able to withstand that volume was one of Zoom’s greatest qualities and ultimately placed it above the rest. 

Will it survive post-pandemic?
Zoom is very well placed to survive when normality returns, whenever that is. There is this feeling that a lot of the changes in business practice during COVID-19 have actually suited a lot of businesses, and particularly employees, so there’s certainly a place for Zoom post-pandemic. I’m not saying businesses who are struggling have enjoyed that struggle, I’m speaking more to the internal works of businesses. Being able to work remote from an environment that is more comfortable and often more productive, is ideal for a lot of employees, and some businesses may be all right with that moving forward. As for larger organisations, I’d suspect a large number to transfer over from an alternate simply because of the reliability and widespread use. Where I do see Zoom slowly evaporating from the main interest is with the younger audiences who were ultimately using it for either uni or to socialise with mates. Uni might still keep it in place, but the young ones are itching to hang out again (much like the everyone really) and I don’t see where Zoom is needed for them as much after that.

Social media during COVID-19

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have been felt everywhere. 55 comms social media coordinator Jordan McDonald identifies four ways that coronavirus should and should not impact on your business's approach to social media.

Reassurance

In a time where so much is uncertain, it’s incredibly important that your business provides reassurance to your customers and audience. This reassurance isn’t one-size-fits-all, it’s important to adapt your messaging to fit your audience. For example, a lot of businesses have taken to social media to make a statement which outlines the impact of COVID-19 to their business right now, how they plan to adapt to those effects, reinforce the government health guidelines, and how to continue to support the business. This has been done with singular text posts, tiles series on Instagram, or business owners publishing an informative video. Once you know how you’re positioned amidst this crisis, or if your situation changes, update and reassure your customers – provide that certainty.

Keep posting

Whilst there has been a significant disruption to normal business activity, it’s important that this disruption doesn’t impact your social media activity negatively. Once you’ve reassured your customer base and explained how you will continue to operate within the guidelines, continue to post your regular content with a new ‘isolation’ approach, and keep it light. We can all relate when I say that our newsfeeds are saturated with COVID-19 news, so any content that is light or distracting is a nice break from the news-cycle. Maintaining your regular posting cycle is important for this reason. Every crisis is an opportunity – whilst that statement isn’t to be confused with trying to sell to people constantly, it’s a great way to use ‘fun’ content to attract new customers for later.

Don’t sell too much

Just about every business is feeling the financial pinch of COVID-19 and often that creates a feeling of desperation as businesses scramble for money streams to keep the business going. Sadly, some businesses will be forced to shut, but for those fortunate enough to continue operating (within the health guidelines), it’s really important you don’t sell too much on social media. Most people are feeling the financial stresses of COVID-19 too, so every dollar spent is being watched even more. A company that is constantly asking for those dollars could really damage their relationship with their customers. With all this said, don’t not advertise at all – simply pivot how you intend to continue providing a product or service and communicate how the normal purchase process for customers has changed.

FREE is great

If you are in a position to offer some part of your service/s or products for free for a period of time, or to existing customers, then that’s a great way to strengthen your customer relationship during this time. Adobe Creative Suite offered its customers two months of free subscription, Uber Eats has provided free delivery for a month. All these little things are great ways to invite customers back to your business and spend their money again. Worth thinking about … 

Mining Reddit for social media content

If you’ve been keeping up with the 55 comms blogs, then you’ll be familiar with the social media platform Reddit. For those unaware, Reddit is one of the most visited websites in the world (6th most visited) and best enjoyed due to the infinite source of great content on literally every topic you can imagine.

It’s often left out of any discussion surrounding big social media platforms, but that’s why it’s most powerful to your content plan.

Ever wondered where UniLad or Buzzfeed are sourcing their viral content? It’s probably Reddit.

Most mornings I’ll scroll through the new content in my Reddit feed, only to see it a few hours later repurposed and published on UniLad. If you’re looking to establish yourself as a content/value leader in your industry and never worry about sourcing content again, this blog is for you. Here are five steps to source social media content from Reddit.

Before I detail each step, it’s important that (for our readers unfamiliar with Reddit), you understand how Reddit works.

Much like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube etc, Reddit makes use of a liking system (upvotes and downvotes), comments, and shares.

You have your own profile, can follow other Redditors. In many ways we’re all familiar with this.

Where Reddit separates itself is with their subreddits; a forum dedicated to a specific topic.

Examples of a topic could be social media, gaming, sports, or as niche as ‘don’t flinch’, a subreddit focused on videos that are meant to make you flinch.

It’s within these forums that communities are built around specific topics and endless content is shared.

A user can create a post within the subreddit and members or visitors can comment on it. Now that we’re clear on the structure of Reddit, let’s explore the methods of content sourcing.

1 Do a general search on Reddit

It may seem obvious, but if you don’t use Reddit much (or at all), you may be surprised by the results. Let’s use a pretend client who works in photography as our example for this step and all the steps following.

For our client we want to create some content around photography, so using Reddit, we perform a general search for “photography”.

The search provided a stack of useful results. A quick look showed a lot of people posting photos they had taken or photos of their equipment.

If you look a bit more you see some posts around help with photography, help with photography gear, “ask-me-anything”, photo series and news in the photography industry.

Alongside the search results is a helpful tab that shows what else people searched for as well as photography; this showed amateur photography, themed photography, wood photography, and so on.

Already we have a few content ideas we can form some brainstorming around as we progress to the next step.

2 Find a subreddit that fits

Next is finding the subreddit that fits best with the content you’re looking to find.

Fortunately, photography is a widely popular topic and has its own subreddit, so we can start looking here. A quick scroll through the subreddit and you notice a lot of posts asking for advice, a lot of people providing tips and tricks, and a lot of tutorials. This is perfect.

We can now begin to narrow down our content into advice, tips and tricks, and tutorials, for the sake of this example.

If you find your particular topic doesn’t have its own subreddit or perhaps it does but the subreddit is pretty inactive, then you can use the general search to broaden your search.

If, for example, your topic was limousines, the limos subreddit is very inactive, so you could broaden your search to cars.

On the cars subreddit, there was a guide to breakdowns and cutaways of different machines, and limos were featured a lot. This is now useful content we can begin to work with.

3 Look at subreddit content from the past month

This is a particularly useful strategy that will help you identify trends in your topic. At the top of each subreddit, you’re able to sort the posts by ‘Top’, and when you click that, it’ll ask you to sort from the top post from the last 24 hours, 7 days, 1 month, this year, all time.

If you choose one month, it will automatically show you the posts in the subreddit that were most popular.

Continuing to use photography as the example, when we sort the top posts from the last month, we start to notice some trends in the best performing content.

Among the top is a post explaining the difference between smartphone photos and camera photos, another is advice for beginning photographers, another is advice to be nice to other photographers, and a few posts about some black and white images found that depict soviet life years and years ago.

As you keep scrolling, it’s noticeable that advice to achieve certain looks, angles, editing and equipment is a trend, and that historical photos and news is an emerging trend. This trend identification is precisely our fourth step.

4 Identify trends, patterns, sticky ideas

As I eluded to in step 3, sorting top content will help organise the content of a subreddit so you can easily identify trends, patterns and sticky ideas.

Above we identified that advice was a consistent trend. We also found that historical photos, particularly around the discovery of old soviet black and whites was beginning to form a pattern of regularity in the subreddit (an emerging trend). These should both be easy enough to understand.

Stick ideas, however, may be a new term. Sticky ideas describe things you come across that just stick in your head after reading them. The thinking is that if it’s stuck in your mind, then it’s likely to do the same with your audience.

In the photography subreddit, there was a post about a photographer who allegedly travelled to “the end of the world” to capture photos of animals rarely seen. The mystery and rarity stuck in my mind ever since.

5 Polish and improve the ideas you’ve found

Now that you’ve got a list of possible content ideas about photography, it’s all about selecting which content you feel best fits your audience.

From here, you polish the content, and improve/repurpose it with your own twist.

Do not claim ownership over other work, obviously, but if you are sharing value to your audience and supporting other content then you are doing it right.

Even better, someone’s content might give you an idea to create something more original of your own.

And that’s it!

Reddit is a treasure trove of ever-growing masses of content, you just need to spend the time taking a look.

Take what you need, repurpose it to fit your brand, and map it out in your content calendar – your audience will be grateful.

The top five social media trends of 2019

Top 5 Social Media Trends of 2019 

1. The year of Stories

At the start of 2019, over 400 million users were actively using Instagram Stories every day, and that number has only increased. Users are responding to the unpolished nature of the media – a refreshing break from the often too polished news feed content. An interesting point to note is that Instagram learned that younger audiences, in particular, are spending more time watching amateur content creators than professional, which largely encouraged Instagram’s heavy investment increase in Stories and IGTV this year.

2. Private Groups

Private groups emerged toward the end of 2018 as a tool for businesses to communicate to an audience in a way that is unaffected by the Facebook algorithms. In 2019, this trend grew more prominent, and users are enjoying feeling like they belong to ‘meaningful’ groups of like-minded people. As we near the end of 2019 and look ahead to 2020, I anticipate private groups will only become a more important communication tool for businesses wanting to engage better with their audience.

3. TRUST 

There’s no surprise that trust has a spot in this list – it seemed like 2019 was non-stop controversy for a number of social media giants, most notably Facebook. But this trust has re-conditioned users world-wide into being more perceptive to deception or inauthenticity. Specifically, 2019 saw the straining of the influencer versus user relationship in light of growing distrust in social media altogether. Users were turning to sources they felt were most authentic – these being immediate friends, family, and even traditional journalism outlets. It’s caused a lot of influencers to become more transparent with sponsored posts, and the emergence of micro-influencers. Trust is never a quick fix so I expect this whole issue will continue to develop in 2020.

4. Videos

We’ve been saying it for a while now, but video continues to dominate social media as the most effective media form. In particular, vertical video is quickly becoming the most common media we consume, and that was supported by Instagram Stories and IGTV. Facebook also launched Facebook Watch which operates a bit like YouTube in terms of it pushing videos to you that you might like, and the ability to create Watch Parties with your friends. Subtitles in videos become the norm this year too – it’s widely known that 80 per cent of people watch videos without sound, so subtitles were a small change that could keep a viewer’s attention a bit longer.

5. Reddit 

My personal favourite on this list is Reddit. The 6th most visited site in the world, for me, feels like it’s always a few steps ahead of the other major social media giants. When I say that, I mean strictly with content. Reddit has tapped into the private group feel since its origination and the interactions on the platform feel far nicer than our Facebooks and Twitters etc. For companies looking to hone in on their niche as well as find great new content ideas, Reddit is incredibly useful for this. It is the most underrated social media and content generation tool. During 2019, Reddit saw massive increases in traffic which were noticeable with subreddits increasing in large numbers. It’s a late trend for 2019, but certainly one to watch coming into 2020.

Tips for stories that engage audiences

The evolving art of storytelling requires more skill than will for brands to make lasting emotional connections with audiences.

Although our company was launched into a rapidly changing media world, being able to give meaning to brands through stories is still our most powerful way of communicating as skilled observers and message makers for business.

There is a fondness felt by audiences when a really good story is told well and it was often intoxicating as journalists, editors and writers involved in that process.

Through the millennia, our culture has survived through telling stories that are felt in our hearts rather than our minds.

While facts are clearly a part of the puzzle of storytelling, genuine connections with audiences that evoke our emotions come from skilful and artful communication.

Across my own journey through News Corp as a reporter, what often made a good story had very little to do with its tangible parts, but rather how aspects of a story felt for audiences.

Facts are there to spark our logic, however, our reasoning drives only a small per cent of our choices to like or dislike something and so it goes for brands.

Likewise, as an actor and live performer, my own stage journey has uncovered the same emotional drivers are at play between those on stage and an audience, although it is a style of visual storytelling that uses the more subtle non-verbal clues of our emotions to tell a story.

Actors know it as our inner-monologue and it cannot be faked because it drives the story for audiences.

When any story is wrapped in emotion, it becomes more relatable for audiences because it engages all of the senses, but most importantly our hearts and giving soul to brands is the element of storytelling that we prize most highly in our work with some of Queensland’s most iconic businesses.

As one our world’s most acclaimed storytellers once said: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you say, people will forget what you do, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou

STORYTELLING FOR BUSINESS

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• The secrets to storytelling

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• How to create great content for social media

• How to share content across multiple platforms

• How to place ads on social media platforms – what works best

For bookings, email ask@55comms.com.au or call us on (07) 3041 1115