You’re (probably) Doing Social Wrong (definitely)

As it should be in the middle of the night, it's quiet.

It's two, maybe three in the morning, and your eyes are just beginning to dart around in the dark behind your eyelids, urged awake by an increasingly dramatic need to pee.

After speed-running the stages of grief and finally accepting the cold hard fact that the ice-cold tile in the bathroom is calling your name, you get up. It's dark, but you know the way. You transition to an awkward, but familiar tap dance, trying to not let the softer parts of your feet linger on the tile too long while any remaining warmth waterfalls from your body, and quickly scurry back to bed and into your nest.

Shit.

Cold feet are a surefire way to wake up.

The stages of grief are a bit easier this time, as acceptance at least means a few quiet moments to scroll through Instagram in bed.

You reach over and pick up your phone.

2:34AM

Plenty of time left.

You swipe up, squinting at the sudden burst of light from the rectangle 3 inches from your face.

"FUCK GRADUATING COLLEGE! I WOULDN'T HAVE GRADUATED MIDDLE SCH—"

You slam the phone down but can still hear Gary V's voice ranting through the pillow. Your partner stirs in bed but doesn't wake up. Thank God.

Now slightly annoyed, you make a mental note to be mad tomorrow that TikToks autoplay with audio when you open the app, but, nonetheless, you want to hear what Gary has to say.

You pop your AirPods in, swipe up, swipe back down, and watch 30 or 40 TikToks before falling asleep with your phone on your chest.

Gary Vaynerchuck is a master of social media marketing. Like him or not, he is crushing the TikTok game (almost 15 million followers), and I don't see him slowing down any time soon. His frantic energy and loud, cuss-filled rants are equally grating and enlightening, and even after watching 30 or 40 TikToks back to back, he still seems to have something to teach.

Others have certainly had more viral hits, but there is one thing Gary seems to do better than most on the platform. Quantity. For every post the average TikTok'er uploads, Gary does 10.

The sheer volume of content his team can produce is astounding. They aren't perfectly edited, and a lot is recycled content from other videos, speeches, or interviews, but no one seems to care.

I had a conversation with a client recently who mentioned he was frustrated by his young marketing staffer. She's inexperienced and, while eager, doesn't seem to be providing as much strategic value as he was hoping.

"How young?" I asked

"24"

"Perfect"

I told him to take a leaf out of Gary V's book and go for quantity over quality. He has an exciting business (brewery) that would photograph well, and an eager 24-year-old with an iPhone camera would be precisely in her element wandering around making TikToks all day.

They run on EOS, and, as a general EOS principal, every employee should have one number they are responsible for.

"Her one number should be 8 TikToks."

"I promise you, if she is completely focused on making 8 pieces of content for your brand, your social channels will grow, your business will grow, her experience will grow, and most importantly, your understanding of your customers will grow."

I think that last piece is why Gary V is so successful. It's the secret sauce. The B-side. The treasure in the attic you forgot about.

Before the internet and social media, getting feedback on your marketing was complex. Getting data on how well an ad performed was slow, inaccurate, and often too late to matter. On social, you get that same data, and much much more, in seconds. Likes, follows, dropoff, shares, comments. It's all data that tells you something about your customers, what they like, and what they want more of. Yes, it's imperfect. Sometimes a post goes viral (or doesn't) with no real explanation. But over time, you can start to put together the puzzle of your audience's likes, dislikes, wants, and needs.

Any good researcher (which I am not) knows that the larger the sample size, the more reliable the data collected from the research. Ask 3 people what their favorite sandwich is. You won't learn much. Ask 100,000 people about it, and you've got reliable and actionable data.

So why do we treat our social with such precious hands? Each post with a creative brief, multi-week creative sessions, and legal team meetings before we post. With that process you can get 3, 4 posts per week. One a day if you're swift.

Where's the value. What's the benefit? Is each post carefully perfected creative, hoping that it will be the one to blow everyone away and go viral? Are you just trying to live up to high brand standards or appease the careful overwatch of the corporate legal watchdogs?

If this is how you're thinking about social, you're missing the point. And I think Gary would agree.

Simply put, the most valuable return you can get from social media is data. Not from a single post or even a week of posts. But when you have hundreds or thousands of posts going up, you can start to paint a picture that actually means something. You can begin to understand what your audience is craving in a way that can make a real difference to your messaging and brand.

If I were running the social for a major brand (that?should?be on social- they all shouldn't), this is how I would approach it.

1. Get a small team who will create the channel's content.
2. Brainstorm types, or buckets, of content relevant to the brand. Behind the scenes, new product reveals, answering questions from customers, etc.
3. Have each team member responsible for a set number of pieces of content weekly. Shoot for as many as possible, ideally adding up to 50 or 60 pieces each week across the team.
4. 60% of the content should be in approved areas or buckets. Stuff you know will be good, quality content that is inoffensive to the brand.
5. 30% of the content should be OUTSIDE the approved buckets. Trending topics, memes, whatever the creator feels they want to try to resonate better with the audience.
6. 10% of the content should be WAY outside the approved buckets. Get wild. So crazy it might work types of content. At best each person has one of these ideas every other week. Don't be afraid. It's social. You can try stuff. Reward the ideas that go too far (even if you don't post them).
7. Set up a weekly review with the whole team to review the content outside the approved buckets to learn from each other, get new ideas, and make sure any legal or moral lines aren't being crossed.
8. Get rid of as many barriers to approval as possible. Ideally, anything that gets past the content team should be safe enough to post and try out.
9. Recognize and reward the creator with the most engagement week after week.
10. Put ONE person in charge of posting and managing the content schedule that everyone else funnels their content to. This person also reports any performance callouts or heads-up (it's Earth Day next Wednesday) to the team weekly. High-level trends are reported to management quarterly.

If you start looking at social as the testing ground for your brand. As an advertising r&d. You will learn and grow so much more than if you treat it like another billboard.

Get the data.

As much as you can.

Then listen to what it says.