Social Media is Like Cooking

Cherry Kwan

I love food, I love to cook, and I really enjoy managing social media accounts.

Whenever I look at social media, I can’t help but think about food, which led me to realize that social media is just like cooking! Surprisingly, there are many similarities between the two that most people don’t realize.

Prepping

Before you start anything, you always need to prepare. When you’re cooking up a new dish, you want to do all your research and gather all the details you need to master it. What recipe should I use? What kind of food should I cook? How many servings will I be making? You want to find a recipe that suits your taste and the taste of your guests.

Similarly, when you’re managing your social media accounts, you want to gather all the data you can about your audience to target them efficiently and effectively.

Once you’ve found a recipe that you like, you want to gather the ingredients you need to cook up this amazing dish. When you’re looking for your ingredients, you want to find things that are new. Just like feeding your guests, you want your content to be fresh and organic.

So you’ve gathered all the ingredients you need, but what are you going to use to cook them? Take a look at what tools would work best to cook your meal. Just like your social media, there are great tools you can use to make the process easier and more efficient, whether it be #Trending or keywordtools.io, the resources are endless!

Cooking

Here’s the fun part: you get to start cooking your dish! Although you’re technically following a recipe, there really isn’t a strict formula for the perfect dish. It may seem like the recipe you’re using is faultless, but all dishes require tweaking. Similarly, this means there’s no perfect social media strategy either. However, you can create an amazing social media strategy that works for you.

Keep trying, add a little seasoning, and put your own flavour into it! You have to do this because a recipe isn’t 100% accurate. Just because it worked for someone else, it doesn’t mean it would work for you too.

Just like trial and error in the kitchen, you have to attempt different things and see which ones work for your audience. Try a variety of strategies, tone of voice, diversity of posts, and see what speaks to your audience the most.

Don’t forget that cooking isn’t all about following steps; it’s about technique as well. You can’t expect to be an expert at cooking for the first time. Every chef has their own technique and tricks that they swear by. Similarly, you will have your own techniques in managing your social media. Therefore, it’s about mastering the cooking (or strategy) and making it yours.

Presentation

You might think that you’re done after cooking the dish, but there’s still more to do. How you present the dish to your audience is extremely important.

Sure your food might taste amazing, but who’s going to eat it if your presentation and plating is unappealing?

When you’re looking for ways to present your content, make sure you’re being creative. Even the basics are important, so check your grammar, post high resolution photos, check dimensions, and be sure that everything makes sense. How your content looks will encourage and attract your audience to view it more often and share it with their friends!

Some Good Cooking Tips

Cook with love! Nothing you cook will taste delicious if you don’t cook with your heart. Cooking with love is like being personable. It’s like comparing your frozen curry dinner to your homemade Japanese curry dinner. It’s obvious that the homemade one is going to taste 100 times better than the machine made meal. So, avoid being robotic through your social media channels.

Be attentive. Don’t walk around when you’re cooking and just leave it on the stove. This is where people make the most mistakes. They leave their food to cook by themselves and what they get is a pot of burnt food. Therefore, you’ll need to attend to your audience when you’re managing your social media accounts. You should always be aware of what they are replying and saying to you. If things are going negative, you shouldn’t ignore it, but address it as soon as you can.

The only way to be a great cook- I mean social media guru, is to keep improving!

Leave a comment below and let me know what your favourite recipe for social media is.

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