As the CEO of a full-service social agency I have an overview of the content and media executions that lead on from the social data strategy work that we do. While there is still the persistent idea that content is king – newsroom style content pushed out in real-time – the best example of this (without support from paid media) is still Oreo’s dunk in the dark.
— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013The content crunch16 months on from 2013’s Super Bowl, social feeds have become fiercely overcrowded. Last week I was at Sky, one of our clients in the UK, and someone tried to show me an article he’d seen on LinkedIn. He opened it up and started scrolling through his feed and muttered, “Where has all this stuff come from, it was only yesterday!” This summed it up perfectly – organic brand content is now crushed in the melee of a friend’s updates, news, junk content and posts from other brands.I hate golfThere is another more efficient way to distribute content. In a feed-based social setup, providing your audience with value by publishing useful or entertaining content is still the way to go. However, posting the same content to everyone doesn’t make sense. I really hate golf – mainly because I am not very good at it, but some people love it. As a sports brand, why show all social users golf-related content, regardless of their interests?The tools needed to interpret social data, identify your audience’s interests and deliver relevant content have been around for a while now. It makes sense to take advantage of them:
Use social data to identify what each of your customer segments are interested in
Create relevant branded content for each segment
Use paid media and targeting to make sure the right users are exposed
Then measure the impact of sharing and the overall impact on brand metrics or sales
TechThis brings us to technology. Paid, owned and earned don’t exist in separate places in the consumers mind – so why are brands using one solution for publishing, another for listening and a third for paid media execution and measurement? For the best chance of success, paid, owned and earned have to be managed from the same platform, so that each can inform the others and they can combine to deliver the best social initiatives.
The ultimate marketing dreamHaving all your social activity in one place then opens the door to the ultimate marketing dream – automation. At a simple level this could mean automatically promoting organic posts when engagement levels pass a certain threshold and sentiment is positive. At a more complex level, portfolio bidding models could be applied to campaigns to improve performance – in the same way that the stock market moved from manual optimisation to machines and computers. It saves time and money, and it’s scalable.It’s still about the content, but social feeds have become painfully overcrowded. This situation isn’t good for users or brands. It’s time to use the tools available to consolidate all your social activity into one place and use paid media to target your audience with relevant, standout content.Simon Mansell is CEO of TBG. You can find him on Twitter @simonmansell
