Making A Difference With Social Content
Content is King. Such a simple statement but one that is overlooked far too often for my liking. Content can be the key that unlocks consumers to the potential and value of your brand. By utilising the vast number of digital enhanced platforms available to us, content becomes something that can help differentiate brands from their competitors and help tell their stories. Most brands have not yet taken advantage of this.
Thankfully, there are other brands that have and therefore invest a great deal into content in the hope that they can make their brands famous and relevant. Content is created for TV, websites, radio etc with aspirations of brand fame in mind, as platform agnostic consumers become increasingly common.
However, when it comes to putting content onto social platforms, brands often expect too much from the organic power of whatever platform(s) they may use. There is the somewhat blind hope that every time a killer piece of content is uploaded in the hope of generating engagement, driving purchase or simply amplifying your message, the same content will take off and be a viral sensation organically. This is definitely not the case and there are a number of things you need to do to ensure that you don’t get caught up with that belief that consumers will do the work for you. You need to, in most cases, pay for it.
The first thing that I would recommend you do is ensure is that your content is intrinsically social. That means learning what your audience likes (not just your brand but others too), keeping it short (remember how time poor and hard to please audiences are), keep it engaging (broadcasting content is so 1991), give them something for free (people love something for nothing just as long as it’s relevant to them) and most importantly make it shareable.
A campaign doesn’t have to be all of these things in order to be a social smash but it will help with your long term social strategy regardless of whether or not generating reach is your number one goal.
Secondly, maximise the power of the ad. If used correctly and in unison with your overall comms strategy, you can increase your social reach and maximise the value of what social is truly about i.e. the ability to build communications and communities of those interested in your story. Think of it this way, you wouldn’t create a TV, Press or Radio ad and not spend money on promoting it. The same applies to social.
