Stop farting out adverts and start listening to your communities

I was at a Facebook event this morning where a presenter asked the room of about two hundred how many were in groups about food and drink (our market) and only four hands went up. This is a terrifying flag about the state of the social media industry, but tbh totally expected because I've experienced several similar moments in the past couple of years.

Social Media isn't just another push marketing channel for brands to bark like mad dogs at any train that passes by, it's primarily a series of communications platforms for people to create and share information and ideas. Like telephones or messenger pigeons, but with more fake news.

I've recently spoken to marketers who don't even follow their brand's hashtags on IG, but pay agencies to monitor those hashtags, find them influencers and run qual research into what people are doing with their products. Wat?

I also had a surreal conversation with a digital leader for a high-street retail chain who was unaware there are FB groups with tens of thousands of members who post amazing 30+ pieces of UGC a day that's of higher quality and getting better results than influencers they pay to create similar content. They had no idea they existed because social media monitoring tools don't have access to private groups and they nor anyone reporting to them had ever run a Facebook search on their own brand.

The terrible issue is a lot of digital and social managers have been educated to think of the platforms as overstocked fishing ponds of willing consumers for brands to dynamite fish in with attention bombs. They think community management and customer service are entry level jobs for outsourcing or delegating to an intern. Neither is true.

Social media is the Batphone to what the public think and feel about you. You think it's worthless because every other comment about your brand is dismissing your product, billing process as archaic or customer service as crap? Guess what? You've just found the hole in the bucket that if you fix will reduce churn and put more schmackos in the revenue column at the end of the year. Congrats! That's amazing ROI! It didn't need you to write a cheque to a research agency either!

Not every brand has the ability to bring consumers into the heart of the business in the way Lego, KLM or BrewDog have. But every business has the ability to listen to what people are saying about it. If your relevant staff think it's wasted time, move them over to designing leaflets (sorry, managing an agency to design leaflets) and hire someone with the empathy to understand why it's important to listen to customers who find time in their busy lives to talk about your brand.

If nobody is talking about your brand in social because your brand is boring and your external comms are awful, find the existing conversations around your industry or related topics, stop, listen to what people are saying, read some more over the next couple of days, get involved and ask questions and then start producing content that people want to share because it enriches those conversations. Become a publisher, build the profile of your coworkers as thought leaders through audience appropriate content delivered in formats they enjoy and get your boss on BBC Business Live talking about how things changes for the company once you stopped barking at trains and started listening.

So, to make it really easy for you:

Go to Facebook Groups and find your communities

Go to Twitter and see what people are saying about you

Go to Instagram and find out what people do with your stuff and/or at your locations

Don't forget Reddit, which will give you all of the above and more

Love, Baggsy x