an Most Important Thing You'll Read About Social Marketing 

In a (sadly) anonymous article on Digiday, a social media manager makes some incredibly salient points about the state of social marketing. This Digiday article is the most important thing you'll read about social today.

I'll extract what I think the most important thing that Leslie (not their real name, but suitable for both genders) had to say (my boldening):

The underlying issue is that social departments place too much value on engagement. Those “likes,” “comments,” “shares,” “re-tweets” and “pins” are the metrics that social content creators use to 1) judge success and 2) dictate what future content looks like. Here’s the catch. The people who are engaging with that content are predominantly worthless. Seriously. That’s not to say that all users on social are worthless. But the ones who mindlessly “like” a brand’s Facebook post because an overt call-to-action told them to are. And wouldn't you know it, those are the users who are dictating a brand’s social content strategy. This is why the last five years have brought an influx of mindless social creative like “SHARE this post!” and “RT if you love Brand X.” They get engagements, and engagements supposedly equal success. And the vicious cycle keeps on turning.

Unpicking the vicious cycle

Let's unpick the vicious cycle. So Leslie has a client with a following on twitter or likes of Facebook or whatever. Leslie's client wants to serve (and ultimately super serve) that audience and will measure success by engagement rates (clicks, likes and retweets).

So far so good?

The problem is what is the Brand's social audience is off-brand? Anyone can like or follow a brand, so a clear and present problem is that people who are not in your target segment might not be following your Brand.

Leslie's client might be a luxury car manufacturer selling $80k cars whose audience is skewed towards 19 yr old men, earning $20k per annum (real example) or they might be a video-on-demand service targeting 25-30 year old men whose social audience is dominated by couponing stay-at-home-moms (real example).

In this case, producing engaging content for your audience means pushing your social channel further away from where you want to be. For the car audience, whatever appeals to 19-year old boy-men, not to the 35-55 year olds who can afford the car.

In the early days of social, with the goal of followers, brands didn't think too strategically about their audiences it was more 'never mind the quality, feel the width'. So yes, your social channels might be full of nonsense.

Even if they aren't - even if you have thoughtfully built an audience that hits the right interests and the right demographics, you still face a problem of adverse selection. That problem can also be summed up by Groucho Marx's line: "I don't want to join any club that will have me as member".

Now this isn't as strong as saying: "you don't want engagement from the kind of person who follows your brand" but it could be the case that in general the kind of people who like or follow brands are not the kind of people you would want to disproportionately focus your marketing efforts on. And that focus of effort is what we are discussing.

Imagine you are a high end airline whose profitability is driven by business class, long-haul travellers. Even if you succeed in getting a targeted audience to your Twitter handle, that audience will only represent a small portion of the audience that matters to you on Twitter.

Your problem looks something like the Venn diagram below. Do you optimise for the green audience (your followers), the dark blue audience (the target audience that matches your brand portrait through behaviours, psychographics etc), the pink audience (the most trusted, authoritative members within your target audience)?

You are also unlikely (unless you are a media brand) to attract trusted, popular, influential or authoritative voices within your audience. I don't have data I can share on this, but it is something we have seen replicated across dozens of brand accounts on different platforms.

Leslie, writing in Digiday, describes the world where much generation 1 and 2 social resides - optimising on the green, 'retweet to win".

Build the virtuous circle

Your priority - from the perspective of building an audience, from the choices you make from content marketing - should be to focus on the pink group primarily and the blue group secondarily, until the green and blue start to overlap more.

Why the pink group? The pink group represents the taste makers within the wider blue group. They represent the active, socially networked accounts which will drive the themes and content the rest of your audience cares about.

This group may or may not follow you. That doesn't matter. But this is the group which best represents where your brand wants to go. It may even take you places your brand doesn't feel comfortable going, but ultimately it is where your customers are.

Back to Leslie

Leslie (as I said not his or her real name) makes some other important points, not least thatFacebook is punishing asinine brand behaviour. Twitter for its part has always had a better model in our view for spreading great content.

Leslie should also take comfort that social, particularly the twitter platform, is a medium where people are gathering, conversing and chatting about the things they really care about. For brands that care about them, that is a bonus.