You can play a rigged game, but you can’t win. 

When it comes to social media and firearms, that’s exactly the situation. It’s a rigged game. Not only do they not want us to win, but they don’t even want us to be able to play. It doesn’t matter what book you read or strategy you follow — social media doesn’t work for the firearms industry like it works for everyone else. 

That’s why I’ve given up on social media — at least the way most people think about it. 

Don’t Stop Using Social

I am in no way advocating for you to stop using social media. That’s not what giving up on social media means, for me. As with most things in marketing, ask five people, get six answers. What I want people to do, especially brands that have anything to do with firearms or the shooting sports, is to frame social media appropriately. 

Social media used to be a meritocracy, where good content and strategy got rewarded. It was the Wild West. Platforms wanted users. For users to see value, they needed to have enough wins to make it worthwhile. Those early users were able to build massive audiences. 

Then, as advertising became more prevalent and timelines became something that were curated by algorithms instead of experienced in chronological order, things started changing. Strategy became less reliable. By now, social media was something brands did because they felt like they had to, even if they didn’t have the strategy or the staff to do it properly. 

The platforms were awash in quantity, but quality was often lacking. Even if your content was quality, it became tough to break through the noise, even for those brands who weren’t promoting a product category that the platforms hated to their very core.

If you weren’t lucky enough to build a six-figure following in the early days of social, how do you approach social now when it feels like such a fruitless uphill climb? 

Focus on Process, Not Outcome

Slow and steady wins the race. It’s trite, but it’s also true. 

Your social strategy should be focused on the process of content creation and delivery. Articulate the process you want to follow, and work that process. You have to let the process work and establish your baselines. 

If you are in charge of social media, and you are getting direction from your leadership to hit specific metrics, I encourage you to push back against that thinking. I know it isn’t easy, but over time, everyone will be much happier. 

Arbitrary outcomes that aren’t anchored to the specifics of your brand’s accounts will lead to frustration and failure. 

Social media is not a speedboat. Yes, you can change it fast, but that doesn’t mean you should be flippant with the strategy. A methodical approach will have its own ebbs and flows, and until you take the time to see what those baselines are, you can’t really work on improving anything. 

The only social metrics that matter are your own, over time. Use this information to hone what works, improve your brand, and your customer’s experience. 

Use Outcomes as Guidance, Not Goals

Your metrics are your outcomes. These are the inflection points you can work against over time. 

I don’t look at my social metrics as the endpoints. The data presents outliers on both ends of the spectrum. Over-performing posts give us an insight into the kind of posts we can work in at a higher frequency to improve engagement. Under-performers tell us what kind of posts to reduce in frequency. 

Even these assumptions need to be tested and verified over time. Worse than that, as soon as you have a handle on what is working, the platforms will change the algorithm or focus and you are right back to square one. 

Knowing this, it becomes all the more important to understand how you have to approach social media. There will never be an endpoint to your social media strategy. It is a moving target that requires constant evolution and acceptance of a certain lack of control. 

As fast as things change, you have to admit that your success lies with what the platform allows you to do. 

That means you have to be looking at your social performance constantly, weighing the most recent trends, and understanding how those fit for you and how to use them at all times. 

Distribution Channel, Not Centerpiece

Luckily, we’ve moved beyond the phase of social media where some companies were using Facebook pages in place of websites, but I was there when it was happening. 

There are, however, still a fair number of brick-and-mortar sporting good retailers who don’t have a website for the shop, just a Facebook page. If you’re one of those retailers, I can’t implore you strongly enough: Get a website. 

Social media platforms should be a spoke in the wheel of your business communication model, but none of them should be the central hub — that should be your website. Understanding that social media platforms are just part of the puzzle is the first step toward thinking about them in what I think is the right context. 

These should be places where you communicate, but also where you experiment. You can’t really do that if the platform has an outweighed importance because if it goes away, you have nothing else. 

In all likelihood, you know someone who has been kicked off of a social media platform and received no information as to why. Appeals go unanswered, or worse, reinforce that random community guidelines have been violated and warnings have been ignored, and the page will not be reinstated. 

If you have a presence on other platforms, a strong website, an email communication platform, local traditional media strategy, and a network of reliable customers, this is somewhat less stressful. 

If all you have is a Facebook page that exists at the pleasure of Meta, you are introducing a tremendous amount of exposure into your business that you need to mitigate. 

Through that lens, you can see how I treat social media. This is just a distribution channel for content that is being posted in other channels as well. Content that is well devised and well thought out will be able to exist on multiple platforms. Might you need to package it slightly differently? Sure. But thinking about platforms in the right way is the first step in getting your mind prepared for how to approach them. 

Build Omnichannel Content

Nobody should be work any harder than is absolutely necessary. This is especially true of content work, because good content works regardless of the platform where it is posted. 

Good photos make for good captions. Good captions make for good soundbites. Good soundbites make for good social videos. Good social videos make for good articles. Good articles make for good long-form posts. 

It should all be connected. The content landing on your website can be broken down into social posts that fill virtually any platform style you are using. Content that is performing well for you on social media should be developed into larger content pieces that live on a website.

Even having a full-blown social team, it can be frustrating trying to figure out how to fill an editorial calendar if you are looking at every social platform as its own channel that needs its own specific content. 

Your content should be able to be customized to any platform, but it shouldn’t have to be created from scratch for each. Take back your control. Make your content about you, not the platform. 

You Have to Decide

There will be marketing and social media professionals who read this and can’t wait to tell me how wrong I am. That’s fine. I’m sure they may be right on some points. Some people absolutely love living and dying with the whims of platforms that lack any sense of logic or transparency. Not me. 

I decided long ago that I was going to stop having my strategy dictated to me by distribution channels that didn’t want to see my content succeed anyway. The playing field isn’t level, and I refuse to play their game. I’m going to do it my way. 

I’m going to create content that I know my customers want because I talk to them. I’ll package it in a way that they can consume, and I’ll look at how it performs and do my best to adhere to best practices so it isn’t harder for my audience to find it. 

What I won’t do is produce content that I don’t like because that’s how platforms want it done. I’ve found ways to color inside the lines without using the paint-by-number colors that I’m told. 

And that’s how I’m going to keep doing it.