The 80/20 Rule For Winning On Social Media: Focus Your Efforts Where They Matter

The 80/20 Rule For Winning On Social Media: Focus Your Efforts Where They Matter

Do you ever wish you could do more with less with your social media marketing strategy?

Social media marketing is one of the most challenging forms of marketing available to us.

In this post, you will learn how just 20% of your effort in social media marketing can drive 80% of your results.

What is the 80/20 rule?

The 80/20 rule is a concept developed by Vilfredo Pareto in the early 1900s after he realized that 80% of land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population at the time.

He then realized that this rule could be applied to other aspects, including his garden where 80% of his pea pod crop was produced by just 20% of the pods that were planted.

Over time, experts realized this same rule could be applied to business and marketing as well.

For social media marketing, it means 20% of the content you produce for social media drives 80% of your results.

What’s important to note, however, is that the actual figures aren’t all that important.

What’s important is that a small amount of something results in a large amount of something else. In other words, a small cause results in a huge effect.

What benefits can the 80/20 rule provide for your business?

In the case of social media marketing, the 80/20 rule benefits your business by helping you identify the content that results in the highest number of engagements for your business.

By doing this, you’re able to make sure that at least 20% of your marketing efforts are put towards producing those content types as they should result in a large number of engagements for your brand.

This can simplify your social media marketing strategy and even make it cheaper as it’ll allow you to do more with less.

How can you apply the 80/20 rule to your social media strategy?

1. Benchmark your social media efforts – Determine the number of engagements you received over the last 90 days.
2. Organize your content into groups – Assign content you published over the last 90 days into groups for content types, platforms, topics, etc.
3. Determine your total engagements for each group – Determine the number of engagements each group received over the last 90 days.
4. Integrate the 80/20 rule with your social media content – Use the 80/20 rule to integrate more of your best content into your social media strategy.

1. Benchmark your social media efforts

Look at the content you posted over the last 90 days or the last three months (whichever is easier for you) across all social media platforms.

Determine the total number of each you received:

• Views
• Likes
• Comments
• Shares

Your analytics in each platform may be able to help you uncover this data. Analytics from a social media management tool may be able to help as well.

There are also social media analytics tools that can help.

You can also calculate the total number of conversions and sales you received from social media during this time.

Finally, determine the total number of each figure you received as well as the total number you received per 30 day increment or per month.

You can use the last 30 days instead if it makes it easier for you to calculate, but this technique will be much more effective if you pull metrics from a larger pool of data.

2. Organize your content into groups

Organize all of the content you posted into groups, including:

• Platform – The social media platform each post was published to
• Topics – The topic each post covers. You can be as broad or as niche as you want with this step. If your niche is beauty, you can create broad topics like eyes, lips, hair, etc. or niche topics like eyeshadow, eyeliner, lipstick, lip gloss, etc.
• Series – The individual series each post belongs to. These are specific content series you’ve created. These could be a day in my life (ADIML), tutorials, reviews, a project you’re working on, a story you’re sharing in bits, etc.
• Content types – The content type each post belongs to, including image carousel post – Instagram, image carousel post – TikTok, long-form TikTok video (over three minutes), short-form TikTok video, Instagram reel, YouTube short, etc.
• Content formats – Educational, entertaining, problem solving and promotional. Add any others you feel are relevant
• Hosts – If you have multiple hosts who create content, create different groups for each host
• Guests – If you feature the same people in your content regularly and they’re not hosts, create separate groups for each

3. Determine your total engagements for each group

This step might be tricky if you used analytics from your social media accounts or a social media management tool to determine your total engagements.

What you want to do is take the same figures you discovered in the first step and see how many come from each group.

This will help you determine which content groups result in the highest number of engagements for your brand and what’s driving your social media success (and failures).

Since you already calculated your total overall as well as your total for each 30-day increment or month, you can easily determine the percentage each group represents in your total number of engagements.

This will help you understand what content types, content formats, topics, hosts and even guests are bringing in the highest numbers for your brand.

4. Integrate the 80/20 rule with your social media content

Now that you know what’s driving your success, you can use the 80/20 rule to ensure at least 20% of your social media content is made up of content that consistently brings in the highest number of engagements for your brand.

You can also see which platforms you receive the highest number of engagements from, so ensure another 20% of your content gets posted to those platforms.

So, if you create 10 social media posts per week, ensure at least two of those posts are dedicated to your best content groups.

This is where a social media management tool like SocialBee truly helps.

It allows you to create your own categories for the social media posts you schedule with it. You can have a different category for each content group you publish to.

Because this tool also has a social media calendar, it’ll make it easy for you to see how much content you’ve published for the next month belongs to your best content groups.

Ways to simplify your social media efforts

Use a social media management tool

Yes, it’s truly worth mentioning again.

Social media management tools help you manage your social media schedule, social media inbox and analytics.

Most allow you to schedule posts to a variety of different platforms. You can even create a single post in your social media scheduling tool but optimize it for and publish it to different platforms.

Like we said, some also have content categories you can create to help you organize your content into groups that are relevant to you.

It also helps you see which content groups you’ve published content for and which groups are bringing in the highest number of engagements for your brand.

Cross post to other social media platforms

If you have content that’s optimized for a variety of different platforms, cross post it to each one.

What we mean is, if you filmed a TikTok, the video format is also optimized for Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels and YouTube Shorts, so you cross post it to those other platforms as well.

Repurpose content

Even if your content can’t be directly uploaded to another social media platform, you can still repurpose your original post by optimizing it for other platforms.

If you create a YouTube video, you can break it down into clips, then optimize those clips for a vertical content format, then upload them to YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram Reels and Facebook Reels.

If you posted a funny TikTok, break it down into funny screenshots, and create a funny carousel post for TikTok and Instagram.

Post accompanying content

When you film videos, you likely capture a lot of content.

This could be bloopers, footage you cut from the final video edit, images you capture in the moment, etc.

This footage doesn’t have to be lost to time or collect “dust” in your hard drive.

Post it across all social media platforms as accompanying content for the main piece of content it relates to.

Use templates

Use templates and predetermined content structures to make content creation easier.

For image graphics, use a tool like Canva, which offers thousands of templates for you to choose from.

For video content, create presets in whatever video editing software you use, and break down each content series you create into content structures.

Content structures are essentially a checklist of everything you need to film for each series you create.

For a review, content structures could be unboxing the product, testing the product, vlogging with the product, filming b-roll footage of the product, etc.

Hire a social media manager

If you have the budget, consider hiring a social media manager or an assistant, at the very least.

They can assist with editing and managing your social media inbox while you worry about filming new content.

Final thoughts

The 80/20 rule ultimately comes down to this:

Find what works and do more of it.

By integrating this rule into your social media strategy in the way we discussed above, you’ll be able to save time and focus on creating the content that delivers results.

Related reading:

• How To Build A Social Media Marketing Strategy: Beginner’s Guide
• Social Media Content Examples & Ideas to Improve Your Strategy
• The Best Time To Post On Social Media (Guide To Popular Networks)

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