Since its humble beginnings some 15 years ago (using the Facebook Brand Pages boom as a rough stake in the ground) social media marketing has changed, a lot.

Nowadays, social media teams have well and truly grown up; comprised of multiple teams and disciplines working across the customer journey; its impact and importance is well and truly recognised.

But whilst the channel’s platforms, practices, purposes and returns have largely matured, there are still a big handful of entrenched topics that continue to hang around agency and client Zoom calls. 

These topics aren’t complicated, they aren’t worth the recurring meetings and playbooks we invest in them, and they need to once and for all find their place in-between Bebo and Vine in the social media graveyard. 

Here are the six lessons we (should) have all learned by now…

Put Social At The Heart Of The Action

Social media has evolved into being the digital shop window of brands and increasingly, the digital shop checkout too. The channel is a brand’s most constant, always on, accessible consumer touch point, so needs the same love and attention as any other.

The day-to-day work of social media strategists, managers, creatives and designers define and maintain how consumers view a brand. They are on the frontline, establishing its tone of voice, executing its look and feel, landing its messages and constantly learning about target audience attitudes and behaviours towards the brand, its products and everyday life.

Social media must not be seen as a standalone channel for executing what’s defined upstream or an add-on. The gulf between brand planning and social needs to end, with social firmly in the mix, being considered for achieving business and comms objectives, standing toe-to-toe with all other channels.

Get Real About Reach

A small percentage of brands (usually young, fun and agile) get by a little without spending and there’s an argument for ‘keeping the lights on’ depending on your customer service volume. But let’s face it, if you aren’t properly promoting your social efforts, you’re almost certainly wasting lots and achieving little.

In traditional channels, an activity’s eventual media budget and plan typically starts being developed as early as creative and production thoughts start flying around. It should be no different for social, where the best creative and media approaches are fully integrated.

(Best) Practice What You Preach 

Many a social media pitch or proposal has included an opener about the thick fog of content pollution plaguing our feeds and the importance of not pumping more meaningless content into the content landfill. 

Yet brands and their agencies continue to do just that. They need to stop producing stuff for the sake of it, understand the environments in which they’re playing and double down on purpose. 

We need to practice what we preach and follow through on what works while stopping what doesn’t.

Stop Chasing Yesterday’s Lightning

If you wrote a dotted history of social media creative, you’d soon see that the most entertaining, memorable and impactful efforts largely happened yesteryear. 

You’d also notice 10-year-old moments that are still acclaimed to this day such as Oreo’s ‘Dunk In The Dark’. Despite the brands behind them clearly having enjoyed one-offs rarely rivalled since, north stars and best practices quickly become dated yet linger as out-of-date industry gospel. 

So much effort in social is spent chasing techniques and tactics that, by design, no longer work. Lighting generally doesn’t strike twice, and rushing to stand where someone else stood in the hope of getting hit is pure insanity. 

Put Everything Into Breaking The Feed

Brands forget to be ‘audience first’ as often as they say it, frequently missing the mark when it comes to providing audiences they’ve managed to be noticed by with something purposeful, that entertains or informs in an interesting way and which provides a moment of joy and satisfaction.

The routine approach of brands establishing a set of content pillars aligned to their product/service and audience interests is broken. It’s a full competitor set doing this, that creates the ‘sea of sameness’ we criticise at every competitor set review, for serving the same people with the same interests, the same stuff. 

To avoid sleepwalking through category conventions in social, brands need to establish strong points of view to build content around, packaged with attitude and a strong visual identity. Just like in any other channel, social creative needs to find tension and cultural resonance. Only then will they stand for and offer something different to the competition and be noticed in people’s scrolls.

Go Further & Wider With Platforms & Practices

Owned channel activity is just one piece of the puzzle and brands will do well to think about the different forms of earned social, from UGC and reviews to influencer and ambassador programmes - as well growing social commerce opportunities. Social ecosystem slides that simply have Facebook, Instagram and YouTube logos in a row don’t summarise a good strategy, they summarise laziness.

Social media as a marketing channel has had a colourful childhood, packed with both reward and regret. Where it’s been an afterthought or rushed, activity hasn’t reached its full potential. Where efforts have been comprehensive and considered, brilliant things have happened. 

The years of agencies and brands musing over the true value of social media are thankfully largely behind us, with everyone now aligned on the channel’s ability to serve a key role and deliver business and brand impact. Through our own experiences and those of others, we have a mountain of knowledge on what the best way to do things are.

To make the next 15 years as exciting as the last, we need to learn our hard learned lessons, and focus on inventing what’s next, rather than trying to recapture what was. The future is bright for social, but only if we can learn from our past.