How Brands Put the Brakes on Social Content Success

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Open up any 'feed,' be it a News Feed, Timeline or even an RSS feed, and one thing becomes clear quickly: everyone is talking about the same thing (for the most part at least). People go online to share bits and pieces of their lives from time to time, but they also spend a lot of time discussing what is going on in the world of television, sports, current events and culture. People share to be part of the moment along with their friends.

Pew Research recently showed that people aren't comfortable rocking the boat online. They tend to share thoughts and opinions they know others will go along with, which means an echo chamber gets created as people share and reshare the same thoughts, content and opinions, perhaps with their own perspective. Facebook and Twitter have capitalized on this with trending topics, and Facebook tweaking its algorithm based on content recency and what people tend to be talking about.

People want to discuss what everyone else is, and social media channels encourage it.

There is one outlier, however: brand content. People are talking about two or three topics, and then most brand posts take the approach of discussing something completely different. They come out of nowhere discussing what they want, while ignoring what everyone else wants.

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Things I’ve Learned from Lately #60

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“Things I’ve Learned from Lately” is a regular compilation of articles that have made me a smarter marketer. Hopefully, they’ll help you, too.

This Week: Failing to Succeed, The Tech Relationship Shift, Facebook’s Future is Mobile and Can Wikipedia Rebound?

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Most Critical Need for Social Media Success: Leadership Support

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Social media marketing has been heralded as a critical need for any business to succeed today, and it's been dismissed as yet another distraction that is unable to deliver tangible results. The truth is social media is critical, but success is often squandered by a lack of resources and organizational commitment. The potential for social media marketing is only limited by the organization itself, and there's one common factor that can lead to success or to failure: leadership support.

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First Social Media Goal: Set Social Media Goals

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The abilities to interact with consumers, generate relevant online conversations and spread your brand’s message in unprecedented ways are truly unique to social media and what make it such an attractive piece to the overall marketing strategy. All of that’s great, but what does success look like?

It’s Up to You.

Social media success isn’t always a scientific process, but it should always be decided upon upfront. Understanding what your goals are and what success will look like for you is essential to knowing whether or not you succeeded. Unlike other forms of marketing, social media doesn’t have a firm set of rules for measuring success.

Success may be as easy as increased sales, blog comments, RSS subscribers, downloads, retweets, etc. However, success may be better customer service, engagement, positive sentiment, or simply establishing a social media footprint.

No matter what success looks like for your brand, it should fit in with strategic goals and long-term strategy. Objectives should be a part of the short-term but have a vision for the future. For example, if you’re using deals to initially increase your following, is that what you want to continue to do in the future?

Measure Before and After

It’s impossible to see how far you’ve come if you haven’t done anything beforehand, so it's important to measure objectives in three phases:

  • Before: Establishes where you started by creating benchmarks.
  • During: Allows for modification and optimization as necessary.
  • After: Provides final metrics to compare to initial benchmarks.

Support Your Goals

Whatever goals are ultimately decided upon, it’s important to support them. Social media isn’t free. Using the tools can be, but leveraging them costs money. Be sure to support your objectives as necessary, or success will be impossible to come by.

Take the Time to Set the Goals

The determinants of success in social media are essential to the planning process, just like other marketing practices. Figuring them out will tell you whether you're treading water, drowning or smooth sailing.