The Changing Face of Social Media

Social media is changing. Being on Facebook today is like living in a rough area of London during a hipster gentrification, watching as your local Costcutter is knocked down and turned into an espresso martini vape lounge. Sort of. So for brands to survive in this rapidly changing landscape, surely the solution is to chuck more and more money at everything and pray for decent reach? We don’t think so.

Hello, I’m Dave from That Lot – the UK’s most important social creative agency according to leading experts*.

If you’ll allow me to continue with the slightly lame gentrification metaphor for a second, here’s one way of looking at what’s happening in social. We all moved to Hackney in 1997. It was great but if you wanted to buy some food you had to walk to the aforementioned Costcutter 25 minutes away, which was okay because you only had a 39% chance of getting stabbed. Then, a few years later, wealthy business tycoons decided to build some modern living apartments, artisan bakeries and install a few Bitcoin cashpoints and soon the place was transformed.

Everywhere you turned, brands. As soon as you thought about bagels, you saw a billboard with a photo of a bagel. On the way to buy a newspaper, you got 17 Buzzfeed articles dropkicked into your eyeballs. But what you didn’t see so much anymore were your friends and family – your life was so consumed by ads for Nespresso machines and clickbait listicles about Hillary Clinton’s favourite flavours of crisps (‘number 7 will shock you!’), that they slowly disappeared like our human rights after Brexit.

Now, to labour this metaphor to death, the Mayor of Hackney (let’s call him Zark Muckerberg) has decided to clamp down on the number of ads and articles being delivered to your face. Some say it’s because Mr Muckerberg is a lovely mayor who cares deeply about your connection with friends and family. Others say it’s because Zark is worried that people will eventually prefer to see their mum than an ad for a Nespresso machine so may consider leaving Facebook. Sorry, Hackney. And if people move out of Hackney, he’ll probably need to get a job in Chicken Cottage or as President of the United States which would, of course, be terrible.

Well done for reaching the end of that metaphor.

So where does this leave brands and broadcasters? Some will argue that it renders social a purely ‘pay to play’ medium where, if you want eyeballs, you pay for them. And of course, there’s some truth in that – the wizardry of good paid is Harry Potter-like in its brilliance and absolutely vital to success on social. But to approach your social media strategy as single-mindedly as that would be like Jose Mourinho selecting a team of 11 goalkeepers.

To succeed in the new social media landscape, yes you will need a significant amount of paid, but you also need brilliant, relatable, engaging, shareable, innovative, platform-specific content. That applies to planet organic, to ad-units and to boostable content. If you take a TV ad, chuck it on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and put a million quid behind it, lots of people will indeed see it. Well done, lots of people have just not cared about 2.4 seconds of your advert. But if you take the ad, create platform-specific edits, turn elements of the ad into, say, Instagram Stories, Carousels, gifs and a Facebook Canvas; amplify the campaign by live-tweeting the hour leading up to the TV ad premiere or doing a Facebook Live with ad-talent afterwards, you’re much more likely to get some meaningful engagement on social and therefore see some actual ROI.

You can’t buy attention, but you can buy the opportunity to gain attention. Which means the quality of the thing you’re paying to wangle in front of people’s faces had better be decent. Or as my esteemed co-founder, David Schneider, put it in a meeting yesterday: “There’s no point putting money behind a stone. It’s still a stone. But if you have a diamond…”

Interestingly, we’re located on Hatton Garden which is famous for diamonds. Coincidence? I don’t bloody think so, mate.

Social ads need to be brilliant and they need to be social. Otherwise you’re basically serving a dry chicken fillet in a vegan restaurant. #awkward

And the idea that organic content should be forgotten about by brands now, on the basis that less people are seeing it than a few months ago, is, without getting too technical: a pile of arse.

To dive briefly into the Paid Owned Earned trifecta (sorry for casually using the term ‘trifecta’), I present to the jury the recent findings of Social Media Today. 70% of conversations about brands are earned, according to their report. And 92% of consumers trust earned, apparently, while only 50% trust ads. So making highly-shareable owned content that generates a huge amount of earned is more important than ever.

A brand’s page is still its shop window. And if you told John Lewis to stop caring about its shop window because a higher percentage of shoppers are now arriving via the lift, I suspect Mr Lewis would smack you with a prestige hamper. The organic content on your page also serves another purpose: it shows people how your brand looks and feels. It gives the brand some personality. Without it, you’ve just got chopped up pieces of an advert and a few-hundred replies to customer complaints.

If you invest in great quality platform-specific organic content, and focus on making it as shareable as possible, you can still see gigantic results – as we continue to do with many of our clients such as Channel 4. “You mean the most viewed UK broadcaster on Facebook, Dave?” – yes, that’s them.

When organic social gold is coupled brilliantly and seamlessly with a robust paid strategy and masterful targeting, you shall reach the promised land.

I’ll stop now because your mate’s just posted a really funny photo of a cat on Facebook.

In conclusion: make good content, make good (social) ads, target people brilliantly and we can all live happily ever after in Hackney.

Clear as mud? Okay great.

* me