It’s almost 2025; social media has been around for the better part of two decades. At this point, there are only two possible reasons that your brand isn’t prioritizing a social strategy:
- You’re playing the saboteur in a Machiavellian plot to destroy your brand from the inside in order to avenge a minor insult that your CEO unwittingly inflicted upon you over 20 years ago.
- You haven’t quite figured out how your brand essence translates into a compelling content strategy.
For the sake of this write up, I’m going to focus on the folks in the second group (though I sincerely hope those of you in the first group don’t take that as an insult).
There’s no shortage of analogies to describe the modern marketer’s frustration with the volatility of social platforms and algorithms. It’s “a moving target.” It’s “the Wild West.” It’s “uncharted territory.” It’s “illegal to use Taylor Swift’s image in a branded meme.”
Content preferences vary from platform to platform, and best practices can change on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis. It’s a full time job just keeping up with current trends, much less getting far enough ahead of the curve to confidently cook up a compelling social strategy.
BUT, you didn’t come here just to read all the perfectly reasonable, totally understandable reasons why your social media strategy is lacking. You came here for some good old-fashioned, actionable industry insight. Well, here it is:
Too often, when emerging brands start drawing up a social strategy, they let their conventional marketing instincts take the wheel and treat their social platforms like sales floors.
I get it, you’ve been slingin’ sell sheets at trade shows across the country for the last few years. You know your brand and you know your talking points. You could pitch your product in your sleep. But you can’t just copy + paste that strategy into social media and hope to see results.
On social media you aren’t competing for market share with the other brands in your category, you’re competing for attention with every other content creator on those platforms.
Your strategy needs to generate value for a social audience – an audience who, by the way, has a well-trained algorithm building them a bottomless feed of personalized content recommendations. That means, more often than not, content with a hard sell gets a hard pass.
Don’t worry – there are plenty of ad platforms where the hard sell is still appropriate, but on social, you shouldn’t be asking customers to buy your product, you should be offering users a reason to follow your brand. Whether it’s through incorporating humor, providing insights, generating aesthetically distinct visual content, or cleverly executing trends, the hunt for your brand’s reason is paramount.
The litmus test for your social content can be boiled down to a simple question: Is this content worth following? If you want to ratchet up the difficulty level, you can change that question to: is this content worth sharing?
It’s a softer, squishier approach that may not have an immediate, short-term impact on your bottom line, but by taking the time to build out a consistently interesting library of content, you’re creating a sense of place on-platform for users to discover and return to again and again.
If you’re gently rolling your eyes and thinking, “Sure, Bob. Easier said than done,” you’re absolutely right. It’s not easy to consistently generate compelling content that stands out on an infinitely scrollable feed. It’s not easy to show up every day and be funny, provocative, charming, and brilliant.
At any given time, the number of brands doing truly like, follow, and share-worthy content only represents a tiny fraction of the brand social universe. While I can guarantee that none of those top-performing brands happened upon their social success accidentally, I’m equally confident that simply trying to retrace their route to a winning strategy wouldn’t yield the same results.
Because here’s the kicker: algorithms don’t run on merit.
Sometimes, good strategies fail. Sometimes, great content falls flat. You can do everything right and wind up back at the drawing board in a couple of months asking yourself whether you were too unhinged or not unhinged enough.
The truth is that social media is a moving target. It is the Wild West. It is uncharted territory, and unfortunately, yes, it is illegal to use T-Swizzle’s image in branded memes.
When it comes to cracking your brand’s social strategy, it requires commitment to a process of research, ideation, and experimentation. If you want users to care about your content, it takes time, guts, and luck. There are no secret shortcuts, silver bullets, or magic beans.
And there is only one guarantee:
If you do not build it, they will not come.
