10 Myths About Social for Brands

How to dispel these within your own company

For company leaders, there are common misconceptions about social media. Even though they are most likely active users, there is a disconnect between brand and personal usage. But the key is that even brands must think like users. Why would people care, why would people share?

1. Social is a one way communication channel (send a tweet and that's it).

Reality: People miss the social in social.' Social is a two way communications channel. It’s not just speaking to people, it’s about having a conversation and engaging back and forth. People can share their ideas and creations and friends or other people can view or engage. Brands are seen the same as other users. For a brand to succeed, it can’t just broadcast, it must listen, engage and create content that will drive others to engage with them.

2. Social is just a marketing channel

Reality: Social is embedded into every part of society. Consumers use social to engage while watching television, online videos, different products and even funny Google searches. Social needs to be embedded into everything across an organisation from marketing, PR, to even product. It's how any product is consumed. We must shift from thinking of social as a promotion channel into a user experience opportunity. It sets the context of how products or services are received. 

3. Organic and paid social are different work streams.

Reality: Organic and paid need to work together synergistically. With platform algorithms that change often, a slow news day, multiple variables can impact how your content is seen and received. 

Therefore paid is need to amplify organic content. However organic content must be used for the creation of paid ads. With users savvy about paid advertisements, finding engaging content can help reduce CPM, CTR and CPV.

4. Good organic social, short form video or meme content doesn't drive brand lift.

Reality: Brand uplift is currently only measured by surveys run by platforms after high spend campaigns. These surveys are restricted to types of specific questions on recall and choice. However, surveys are not always reliable. One small study that I completed asked users about their behaviours and then followed users to see their actual behaviour on social channels. Astonishingly 2/5ths of survey respondents’s answers did not accurately reflect their actual behaviour on social media.

Engagement has been shown in many studies as an equation to brand love and consideration. Ensuring content is relevant is key to driving business impact. With organic social hard to measure, finding a consistent engagement metric is one way to help show brand lift.

5. Because TikTok is a content based platform, paid social isn’t necessary to help establish a channel.

Reality: There are plenty of examples on TikTok of where ads have grown follower rates. And although yes, TikTok is a content based platform, there are studies that show the larger the account the more engagement you get. That's due to people seeking that content and then following it.

TikTok itself says that followers of a brand handle are

• 1.9x more likely to like, share, or comment on your brand's videos.2.5x more likely to take future conversion actions with your brand

• 5.4x longer viewers of your brand's livestream

• The average video engagement rate for brands with greater than 1 million followers is 15% greater than that of those with less than 1 million.

Therefore a successful TikTok presence relies on good content + boosting to drive engagement. This will lead to more engagement and visibility along with followers. It then necessitates continuing to show up with engaging content.  

6. Social is for GenZ only and all the kids 

Reality: There are many different audiences on social media on many different platforms. 60% of the global population is on social media. However, people use social in different ways and in multiple ways. 

For instance, opinion leaders may be on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, however they prefer to engage with brands on Linkedin and Twitter reserving Facebook and Instagram for personal accounts. Gen Z may have Instagram, Lemon8 and TikTok but use Instagram for engaging with friends, TikTok for creating and finding entertaining content, and Lemon8 for more in-depth content on their favourite topic.

Understanding which audience for which property is on which platform is something that needs to be undertaken with a larger mapping exercise. 

7. Trending on Twitter means everyone is talking about my content... 

Reality: Twitter is just one social channel, and one that is potentially on a decline losing 9% of active users in the US in Q1 2023. Twitter can act in a vacuum over indexing on celebrities, opinion leaders, influencers and media. However due to its accessibility with APIs for social listening tools and the prevalence of media on the platform, people often forget the impact of other (often larger) social channels which aren't as easy to track. These channels  may reflect more relevant conversation to other audiences.

8. Give social to manage to the intern / influencer on team

Reality: Social is a marketing discipline. Although everyone may be a social media user,  managing a brand account takes very core skill sets from understanding data to making very calculated strategic decisions. There are many differences when managing a brand account - can't say certain things, can't use trending music in same way or have other restrictions that personal accounts aren't beholden too

9. Influencer is just about paying someone to say nice stuff and boosting on social

Reality: Successful influencer strategy isn’t just a promotional post from a person on social media.  Influencer strategy is about driving constant content cycles, and empowering others with the tools to continue to shape the conversation themselves vs always having the brand lead.

10. Do you really need the vertical asset and can't you just use horizontal? 

Reality: When creating assets, you need to think of how people will consume the content and what platform it will live on. This requires looking at data for platforms and asset engagement. Create assets for the platforms they will consume and optimise for how it will be shared.