Can’t scale, won't scale
Many in business are playing defensive right now because economies, currencies and entire industries have tanked this year.
The result is many are stuck with the same pandemic social media strategies and tactics they’ve been using for years, because if they try something new and it fails, their budget is moving to the direct mail team. So, people like me are brought in and asked how they can sweat the margins to get incremental improvements on what they’re already doing, from things like refining copy or image usage, frequently asking to be benchmarked against competitors facing the same challenges to prove their working is logical.
Consequentially, alongside those recommendations, I spend a lot of my time talking through alternate things they can be doing that give vastly improved results. Like Reels, Stories, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts.
Baggsy’s first Reel posted Christmas 2020, the comments on it are 100 weeks old
It feels all the more strange to explain them, because we’ve been using Reels now for two years, and since ByteDance bought musical.ly in 2017 before merging it into TikTok in 2018, they’ve had more than enough media depictions of functionality, content and creators who’ve gone global. We’re years into understanding how it all works, but it’s somehow all still new to many who work in social media.
The problem isn’t that people haven’t wanted to bring their brand to TikTok or take advantage of Reels, but that they lack the resource to do so.
And equally so, many in those roles aren’t practitioners. They’ve never taken an hour to sit down and do nothing but enjoy TikTok, yet alone pop the bonnet and rummage about by posting their own content, getting a business account and exploring the tools there.
Creative costs are currently the greatest challenge in our industry.
While five years ago you could get away with posting the same image content three or four times a week on Facebook and Twitter, that no longer floats. With a team between two and four, we posted ~190 times at week when I ran content and community in EMEA for Norton Security. People still wince when I say that, but with more channels available now than in 2017, I’d actually expect more posts a week now.
The problem is it costs a lot more to produce 190 full screen video posts than it does 190 links to articles or images.
Interest graph has spread over the land with the advent of every other platform ripping off TikTok, nudging out social graph and ending the era where you got your content in front of people just because they follow you. With interest graph, you produce content, it’s shown to people who should like it, and if they do it then scales to be seen by more people.
For example, I have a thousand followers on my underloved personal Instagram account, but my Reels frequently get 14k reach. My feed posts certainly don’t get that. If I posted four of those a day, I’d likely get 40x more impressions than I have followers. With organic reach of feed posts on Facebook, a page with a thousand followers would need to post ~400 times in a day to reach that. You don’t have to be an economist to know which margin you want to sweat of the two.
So, what’s the answer?
Either invest more in creatives, be those internal hires, freelancers, ‘influencers’ you find who are doing great content in your niche already on the platforms you want to win on, or invest in training and tools for the members of your social media teams who want to learn to create content. Then sit back and let them create loads of work, then test and fail until they hit gold. It’s that simple.
The challenge is most marketing people are happier with putting 90% of their social budget into paid media, knowing the numbers are predictable and logical. Nobody lost their budgets (or jobs) to direct mail for hitting or performing above industry benchmarks.
We ran a system called donkeys and unicorns at Norton, where for every couple of hundred donkeys we posted, (which did well and were dependable but you’d not tell anyone about in a job interview) we’d find a unicorn. The unicorn would deliver a sizable chunk of our reach, engagements, clicks and/or revenue that month.
The risk for many brands right now is paid media on Meta platforms is great at selling things, but terrible at building brand. And you win in a crowded marketplace by being cheaper than the competition or differentiating yourself in a way that makes people want to pay more for your product.
By going in deep on paid media, you’re going to waddle into the same problem Adidas found when they went hard on efficient rather than effective advertising, to appease the KPIs, forgetting the importance of building brand to justify the bigger price tags.
To quote Drucker, “what gets measured, gets managed.” Make sure you’re not missing the current opportunity to do lots of beautiful creative work at scale, because you’re scared of a spreadsheet.
