Measuring the effectiveness of organic social
Brands spend time and money creating content. What do they get in return?
This is a quicker than usual Dispash. A longer one is waiting in the wings.
Onwards.
Keeping up with the ‘grams: what payback do brands get on organic social content?
Ask a social media professional if what they do is valuable to the business(es) they work for and chances are you’ll get a miffed and vehement yes in response. It’s likely they’ll include the ability to keep the brand’s community engaged and leverage virality as part of the reason why their work is so vital.
Ask a senior marketer and their response will be different. Almost certainly with at least a couple of “buts” thrown in. Most of the good senior marketers I’ve worked with see the value of social media but also have a healthy level of scepticism.
Part of this issue is that social itself is not the easiest media to define, as you quickly get into sub-disciplines in a way that’s a lot more complicated than other media. Billboards, bus stops, and shopping centre panels are all clearly Out Of Home and measurement and business impact is generally robust and straightforward to understand.
Customer service on social can absolutely be measured in terms of successful resolutions, speed to resolution, and NPS. You can even incorporate fluffier metrics like sentiment changes to correlate with customer experience value models.
Influencer marketing is a little tougher, but if the brief’s well defined, you should be able to isolate top or middle of funnel impacts on brand tracking, and track bottom of funnel performance.
Paid social is - or at least should be - obvious.
But branded content. The memes. The lols. The jumping on every trend. The TikToks, Tweets and Reels. Plenty of brands such as Wendy’s or Duolingo are held up as “great” examples of social. But does great content correlate with business metrics? And what should those metrics be? And does a brand who produces constantly entertaining content to an engaged follower set actually deliver ROI?
A few months ago, strategist and Marketing Week columnist Tom Roach asked exactly this question. What’s the actual value of having people produce branded owned channel content.?
It’s a question I tried to answer. It’s not ‘not valuable’ but it’s also not entirely valuable. And trying to answer this led to me writing around 2,500 words for WARC as a white paper on the value of social.
Maybe it’s helpful. Maybe not. But in replying to Tom and researching previous work in this space for WARC, there hasn’t been a huge amount of actual work done in measuring the ongoing value of social. So view this as a starting point rather than a definitive answer.
You can read the WARC paper here (with a subscription) and I’ve put a small excerpt in below for those who aren’t subscribers.
Measuring the effectiveness of organic social: an excerpt
In 2021 Weetabix went viral with a Tweet that combined the breakfast cereal with Heinz beans on top, generating just shy of 239k interactions and 140 media items (not including social media posts from the publication coverage).
Applying the logic that the average account has 707 followers and each retweet was seen by between 1% - 5% of their audience, this puts the potential reach at somewhere between 1.6m to 8.1m.
These numbers sound impressive, but put into context of the broad FMCG market, they quickly become small. 10m out of 27m UK households are estimated to have purchased a Weetabix product in the past 12 months - some much more regularly. That’s Tweet is still only reaching a fraction of the population, albeit in a very cost effective manner.
As Les Binet has noted, a million is still a small number when it comes to mass market reach, while other channels like TV (or even PR) can raise exposure quicker and is less of a moonshot strategy. Lower than expected TV ratings can be made up by networks quickly. Organic social media posts that are only seen by a few hundred followers are unlikely to suddenly grow in exposure.
The issue with reach also extends to creating content that continually keeps the follower base engaged. According to social SaaS tool Rival IQ, the average engagement rate on Facebook is 0.06%. On Instagram, it sits at 0.47% and on Twitter, 0.035%. TikTok fairs better than most platforms with an engagement rate of 5.69%. Another SaaS tool, Social Insider, is more positive on reach, estimating 9.34% reach rate on Instagram and 4.32% on Facebook
Apply this to two brands that have been mentioned previously in the paper and the numbers come out low. Of Sephora’s 21m Instagram followers, on average 1.96m will see a piece of content and 98,700 will interact with it. For contrast, Sephora’s global revenue sits at $10bn. Meanwhile, Duolingo, who have 60.7m monthly active users, can expect to receive an average of 364k engagements on their TikTok videos - although reach-wise, the language app can boast some impressive numbers, with their most liked video reaching 30.8m.
The final consideration for social is that people who follow brand accounts are more likely to be loyalists or existing customers, but to grow, brands need to have penetration among light buyers and new customers.
Content of interest
Regulating the new AI era
Open AI has called for regulation into the AI space. Depending on your point of view, this could be because they recognise the dangers of what they’re building, or a cynical way to shut emerging competition out of the market. Meanwhile, assorted creatives including comic Sarah Silverman are suing Open AI as they’ve claimed their material has been used to train ChatGTP. It’s almost inevitable that there will be some regulation, but what should it be and who does it protect? And what happens if different jurisdictions take different views on what and how to regulate? And what’s the risk to a business if they get caught up in an AI lawsuit over intellectual property? Prompts of “write me x in the stye of y” are going to crop up in a lot of legal filings. LINK.
Gen Z and financial nihilism
Lumping generations in together as mass segments is nonsense, but there are some generational trends that are genuinely interesting. Such as what happens when you have a generation that enters the workforce where a stable job is no longer guaranteed or even desired, the goal of working and saving to buy a house seems utterly unattainable, and having children is a mixture of a) too expensive; b) too constricting; c) too hard? And there’s a good chance that we’re driving the planet to destruction, so accumulating wealth seems a bit pointless. Attitudes will shift and change as Gen Z age, but the incentive to save has never been lower. Older generations may struggle to understand the logic behind this attitude. LINK.
Mark’s metaverse isn’t yet dead?
Roblox has announced it’ll soon be available on Meta’s VR headset, Quest. Part of the issue with platforms like Decentraland and Horizon Worlds was there was very little purpose to them and not many people using it. Roblox, on the other hand, is both fun and highly used. It’s not the metaverse but then most metaverse discussion is broadly online games. Bringing other more popular platforms to Quest makes sense but it also puts Meta up against Apple, who have a lot of experience in building and monetising app stores. LINK.
To boxset or not to boxset
Netflix led the way when it came to boxset releases, but then realised that dumping all your content in one go wasn’t always the right approach, while linear TV realised that some programmes lent themselves much better to binging on catchup. Neither seem to have quite cracked the code, and this is less a tech question and more of a UX and TV question. Dan Taylor-Watt does as well as anybody I’ve read in breaking down the pros and cons of the assorted approaches. LINK.
Playing us out this week: The Lemon Twigs - In My Head. Everything Harmony, their latest album, is a beautiful record that probably belongs in another decade. There’s hints of Beach Boys, early Bee Gees, Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, and definitely Todd Rundgren.