Marketing and ‘engagement’ used to be an exercise in faith. Maybe you judged the success of content by word-of-mouth from one’s immediate network, from positive feedback and write-ups by the press and marketing Illuminati, or by an uptick in bottom-line metrics that you surmised came as a result of great content.
Then digital media came along, followed a decade later by the more engaging (there’s that word again) social media and all of a sudden there was a tangible measure of success, a scoreboard that told you whether that fire content was also deemed great by the consuming audience.
The leaders in social media were, and largely remain, the stat stuffers. They mastered the system, making game plans that would light up the scoreboard, creating the foundation for what defines successful social media strategy and results today. Aaron Eisman was young in his career when he got to witness, and became part of, one of those early leading organizations — Bleacher Report. There, Eisman picked up lessons that still serve him today. In a recent conversation, he reflected on how, with every sports account activating around the same major sports storylines, B/R stood out.
“The Social Moments team [at Bleacher Report] was the viral meme team, I guess you could say,” said Eisman, who also worked with Turner Sports and the NFL Network before starting his agency, Eisman Digital Consulting. “It was a team of 10-12 people literally sitting in a room a couple of times a week and they would just think of viral moments or they would create an idea before it happened. Like, if the Cubs are going to win the World Series, what are we going to do social media-wise to make it look really exciting and dope?
“We were playing chess and we were always steps ahead of the competition. We were always getting ready to do checkmate while they were just starting their chessboard.”
So much of social media strategy is being ready for anything and everything. Planning to be extemporaneous. There’s a place for timeless content, to be sure, alongside the real-time, reactive, opportunistic content. As the industry matured over the years, everybody began to think more like chess, trying their best to anticipate two or three moves ahead, the circumstances that would play out — all while keeping in mind the ultimate goals and mini objectives to achieve along the way.
“Ultimately when you think proactive, reactive, evergreen, breaking news — any of these other creative metrics and things that you think of in your head about how the content should be or what it should be, then you’re going to really advance as a social media team, and just think ahead of the curve,” said Eisman.
The final destination — the definition of success — is not the same for everyone. But the scoreboards on the platforms all read the same, we’re all reviewing the same box score, context notwithstanding. The metrics do serve as a feedback mechanism; is great content really great if not enough people see it? As long as the dominant social media channels continue to dominate, you’re largely playing by their rules. And, what hits on those channels tends to influence user behavior, consumption patterns, and preferences in general.
All that’s to say that social media strategy, while not slave to the metrics, is certainly influenced by them. It’s a feedback loop that leads a strategy to success.
“If the strategy is building out the right content, then the content should hit, and if the content should hit, then the numbers should prove it,” said Eisman, who has run Eisman Digital Consulting for nearly five years now. “The numbers don’t lie, so the analytics should tell you… the analytics should reaffirm or adjust the overall strategy. So it kind of works in a cycle almost between those three aspects.”
It’s tempting to get swayed in the silo of individual posts, to be seduced by the serotonin of a post’s objective performance. But it’s important to appreciate the forest for the trees, too (a cliche, but it’s apt here!). The success or failure of individual posts, of a day in the life of a social media strategy is fleeting. The half-life for the majority of these things is so short. That’s why it’s integral to understand what we’re doing all this for — what are the goals, what should the short-term strive to add up to in the long-term?
In an evolving world where overnight success is possible, where a single TikTok video can catapult an account from 1000 to 100,000 followers, it’s important to articulate the actual goals. Sometimes it is more followers, sometimes it isn’t. Eisman and his team encounter a diversity of stated goals working across clients for Eisman Digital and strategize accordingly.
“People want different things: to help grow their social media account or grow other goals they have. So how we get there is you want to figure out the goals of the person or the client you’re working with then you figure out the strategy of how to get to those goals,” Eisman explains. “And some of it’s not overnight. I mean, one of my biggest clients right now is a golf training app and they more care about the process of what the content looks like.
“If it takes time for us to create the great content, it’ll take time, but we don’t need to push out a great post every day because sometimes it leads to more followers, sometimes it doesn’t and we’re accepting of that.”
As social media has matured over the years and long ago transcended the remit of the archetypal ‘intern,’ social media strategy is now part of the bigger picture, expected to deliver against the organization’s true, bottom-line goals. So social media cannot and does not exist in a silo. It often works in tandem with all of the organization’s other marketing and engagement channels — there’s, umm, synergy (sorry, had to use that word). So whether you’re leading an in-house social and digital media team or running a social/digital media agency like Eisman, it’s critical to step out of those siloes.
Eisman expounded on the subject: “There are different forms of marketing, social media is one of them, but do you want to do a newsletter or do you want to do ad placements on Google? Do you want to do paid social or does your organic post that does well numbers-wise deserve to be boosted and put money behind it? And influencer marketing, there are just so many forms of marketing these days when five, ten years ago, probably more ten years ago, it was your general marketing people, your public relations people, and maybe you had 1 or 2 social media people ten years ago, and now it’s completely changed into social media needs to be a beast for organizations.”
While we marvel at the exponential growth in importance and power of social media in the last 10-15 years, it’s just as necessary to understand that social media is not the answer to everything. It’s not a magic pill. So as Eisman, or any social media leader, works to set and execute against goals for a given company, part of that is understanding where social media has less influence on the ultimate outcomes. There are plenty of precision holes to pick, but, generally, the promises that we want social media to proselytize need to be kept on the other side.
“There are some KPIs and metrics that social media can hit very easily and we can go after those growth metrics and stuff and those engagement metrics and those impression metrics and all that stuff, reach metrics, whatever you want to call it,” Eisman explained,” but sometimes we can only accomplish so much on social media. It’s got to be the product that has to sell…it has to be good.”
It’s true that we now have a better understanding than ever of what works and what doesn’t work. But with that greater insight comes more complexity as the new challenge is connecting all those disparate dots that comprise the bigger picture.
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