How Brands Can Win On Social Media Today

Dear brands and brand managers…

Having worked and been exposed to the marketing, communication and advertising industry for 15 years, there is a hard truth that has become clearer and clearer, and will have many brand managers saying: “No, that’s not the case”. This hard truth is that your customers on social media do not care about your products. While this may sound harsh, and perhaps little blunt – but it is true.

Let’s take a closer look. When your customers are looking at their social media feeds, whether it is Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or YouTube, on the actual page, the reels tab or in the shorts tab, customers are there for entertainment or connection purposes, most certainly not to watch your branded product videos.

When we know what our customers purpose is, we can then create content around that. This again is nothing new. When creating an advert for a certain media type, we design it appropriately. The copy on a billboard vs. a flyer or brochure would and should be totally different. This statement gets brand managers saying “that’s obvious”, to which we need to pose the question as to why brand are still making this massive mistake on social media – posting videos that are all about their products and focusing on showing all the various offerings or specifications about that product. This means marketers are falling into the trap of creating bad content.

How many of these expressions have you heard before?

• Content is king

• Framing is paramount

• The setting is key

• Content is key

Again, why do marketers keep falling into the bad content trap? Have we fallen so far in terms of great creative work and are simply making sure we tick all the boxes and see how much product and product specifications we can cram into the content we create?

So here is how you, as a brand and marketer, can make the content better, more relevant and well received on your social media platforms:

• Shift your focus on social media:

Shift from looking at your social media channels as a sales channel or a channel to drive product awareness, to one that is a client entertainment channel.

• Stop worrying about the vanity metrics:

When you shift your focus towards entertaining your audience, you must relook what the metrics you are measuring. Likes, number of followers and those vanity metrics are now less important. Elements like sharing or tagging others to watch your content become key drivers and the more important metrics to focus on.

• Do not force content:

Now that your focus is to use your social media entertainment channel you cannot force your product or simply inject your content into relevancy. Be authentic, real and give customers a reason to share your content.

When you are able to grow your overall organic views (as you are creating engaging and entertaining content), you will automatically get a huge increase in profile visitors, learning who and what your brand is about. And if they are interested in your product and want more information, will then go to your website, learn more about your products and if they are relevant to their need state, buy the product.

By focusing your brand efforts on entertaining your audience, you actually begin to implement the best strategy possible for your business. If you want to sell products on social media. The process is simple - entertain first, sell second. This is how brands win on social media today.