What making 7000(ish) pieces of content taught me about social media.

There’s a piece of text I utterly love, (so much that I have it pinned to my Twitter) check it out.

The hardest part about being a creative is sitting down each day and not becoming an alcoholic.

In every agency, studio or freelance chunk of anyone’s career it’s a sentiment that we can all relate to. Whether it’s celebration drinks or need-to-power-through-this drinks. As a writer, camera monkey and graphic designer, I’ve had the benefit of throwing myself into different areas of the creative field, and found it perfectly and sarcastically describes the creative dilemma.

For the last nineteen months I’ve had the distinct pleasure of being a creative on the Born Social team (They’ve also just done a major rebrand. Check out creative director Paddy Smith’s thoughts & learnings on the whole process). And I know that no other part of the industry I’ve been in has made me think about this sentiment more than anything else. Social media is about speed, and making the most of the eight seconds that anyone pays attention to your particular signal. That number up in the title? It’s true. A touch over seven thousand pieces of content in nineteen months have passed from my brain and into the noise. Some context? In my last role I made thirteen pieces of content. In a year.

Social media is speed.

So you make content fast, make strategy fast, make mistakes fast and hopefully learn fast. Back in my game developer days I saw the power of a good post-mortem session. As I say goodbye to the world of marketing and advertising and head off to the next part of my own journey, it’s a good a time as any to pull the good bits together. Doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie starting your first agency gig or a one-man band looking to up your social media game, I hope you can find something in here to help you with your own seven thousand.

People don’t give a shit about design.

Sorry if that’s a revelation to all the students out there who are still in the “design will save the world” phase. We want to believe that Apple et al has made a new generation of people that care deeply about the process and what makes good design. But really? They don’t. No average person is talking about material choices and Bauhaus influences, nobody gives a flying fornication about why you should never put a gradient in a logo. And nowhere is this more prevalent than on social media. Don’t believe me? Check it out. In the world of short views and algorithmic feeds, content is king.

I spent a while fighting it, graphic design school doesn’t die easy, and yes clients will always push for pretty. But if you don’t need it? Don’t do it.

They do care about style.

Here’s the bit where I come off sounding like a hypocrite, but hear me out.

Think about the top accounts you follow on social, brands or creators, the ones that you check and like regularly. What do they all have in common?Every one has a form they follow, a style. Even the ones that don’t give a shit about design still follow a style. And that is the key to making your content engaging and creating a following. Consistency is essential. Hell, it impacted me so much I went from posting whatever I shot that day to making my Instagram into a second folio (cheeky plug, go on and look, I’ll wait).

You will always have to trade off between reach and positioning, that’s the balancing act for any client. Content that will be seen organically and shared by the most people may not make your profiles look great, but if you deliver that standard they’ll stay. Probably. If you want it to look pretty? Well, see earlier point and realise that you still need to make sure you’re following a consistent style. The audience that do follow at that point are smaller but the most likely to convert into an engaged one.

Think about it.

I know, I know.

But you’d be very surprised how many clients I worked with that never considered any part of their strategy. How and when you post is just as crucial as what. Especially as every platform now has a form of algorithmic feed, and knowing how to play that game is crucial. Unfortunately there’s no hard and fast rules, but you can learn from others and experiment yourself to find what works. This is the one point in social media where it really pays to take your time and slow things down. Look at what hashtags you’re using, when you’re posting, the frequency and patterns of uploads and the type of copy. For example, on my own feeds I’ve found posting in the middle of the day or evening with film photography hashtags boosts my engagement rates by at least triple than my usual work. Better stock up on the 35mm then eh?

The strategy behind your content is important, and you need to make sure you have a plan. Otherwise you’re the equivalent of reading beat poetry in the middle of a speed metal concert. You might be saying cool stuff, but no-one’s going to hear it.

Own your process.

This is a workflow point more than anything else, but it’s something I made sure to hand-over to the rookies joining the creative team. And for anyone that jumps into M&A it’s something that you will play around with more than most other areas, simply because you don’t have the time to get this one wrong. How you create content, from ideation to implementation, is unique to every creative and client. I’ve worked with people that have music playlists to get them in the zones for certain types of client, whatever it is that works and gets you to that place. Use it. Figure out how much of the content can be templated or streamlined and use the extra time elsewhere. That thing about strategy? It really helps you spend more time making stuff and less time trying to figure out what to do.

When I was at full capacity I ran accounts for twenty clients across diverse sectors. FMCG all the way to FinTech. And still covered briefs and one-off pieces or wider campaigns, so you can imagine how much mental gear-shifting took place across the average day. The pace at which we worked meant that every minute of my time was valuable to any client at a specific time, and if I got pulled out of that client’s space then it hurt them and the work I was doing. You can’t slide from a restaurant to insurance and expect to slot into that mindset, so you need the process. Give yourself blocks to only work on short briefs so you can handle larger chunks of client work across the day. Make sure your team knows your deadlines and push back on clients when they over-run your time.

Embrace the constraints.

AKA, you will never have everything you want. This is a cold hard truth of any creative field, and it’s compounded in social media. One of the things that attracted me to working with Born Social was their philosophy of working with smaller clients to give them access to the same thinking as the big kids with big bankrolls. Out-think, not outspend.

We did good work, they still do good work. But this meant you’d never really get access to the spend you want to put into campaigns, or that you don’t have access to every resource you might want. On the flip-side, anyone who’s worked with the big fish know what it’s like to be hamstrung by internal process or the seemingly endless rule books to take into consideration. There are always lines you have to colour in.

But, you can choose the colours.

That’s what this is about, if you want something to work then you’ll find a way. Start by thinking big and then think realistically, your solutions are usually in there somewhere. You don’t have budget, cool, then how can you get a similar impact? No resources? Great, figure out what can you do with what they have or what you can MacGuyver together. The only thing that holds no weight for me is lack of time, but we’ll get to that.

I had a client come to us with nothing but a, frankly terrible, logo and a product line. That’s it, no identity, no platform, no presence, nada, zilch, bupkis. I put together a month’s worth of content based around a few of the things they had and an idea of what the general market was doing and it got dumped. They hated it. So I went back and started looking at what they weren’t saying and what we could do with the brand. They’d given us an open canvas and we’d painted the same picture as everyone else, well that’s an easy fix. Each month we evolved our output and strategy, pushing them for customer insight and pushing internally on what we could do. At our 12 month review? They told us they used our social output as the benchmark and style guide for the rest of their marketing activity. Success. Even if they still use that logo.

Pull apart what the client says they want and figure out what they really need. Which brings us nicely to…

Clients are idiots, except when they’re not.

I knew an art director once who used to have this hanging on the wall over her desk. Never really understood it, and she told me I would. And now I do.

Clients come to you because you fulfil a knowledge gap to them, in design terms that means you solve problems the way they think they like them solved. Our clients had no idea how social media worked (does anyone?) and came to us because they knew that regardless of that fact they needed to be on it.

Some of the seven thousand was a client that I thought I knew how to handle. It was a great product and I had experience working with their industry, should have been a cakewalk. But they hated all my content, were nitpicking with the feedback and despite a really productive on-boarding meeting it seemed like a false starter. I raged like every creative does, had a sulk and a vent to my seniors and went to the pub with the team for another collective vent and sulk. One piece of feedback kept sticking with us, and then we all sparked. We’d ignored this piece because it seemed like a throwaway line, but in hindsight it showed us something about the client.

They knew what they were talking about.

We as creatives, and account teams in general, might only spend a chunk of our time on a particular client at any one time. But that client spends 100% of their time on what they do. They live and breathe their product, or their service.

You will always find the time, if you want to.

I have yet to meet a single creative person that doesn’t have even a vague complaint about time. And yes, that includes me. Like I said at the top, social media moves fast and if you don’t keep step it will run you over.

But the reality is, if you want something to work bad enough then you’ll figure out a way to make it happen. Even if it means pulling a couple nights of staying in the office until 11pm and then running for the last trains home. Or getting into the office at 5am so you can tighten up the pitch documents before the 9am Skype call. That’s the nature of this game. Good work is done with hard work. If you don’t want to put in the hours, then accept either the idea isn’t that good or you don’t give enough of a shit to make it happen. Nothing wrong with either, but complaining about time doesn’t make either of them any less true. I spent countless long nights and more than a few weekends putting together strategy documents, researching numbers and data to support what we wanted to do.

The first client I pitched an Instagram only strategy to? That was four days of extra time, staying back until the last train and getting in before the cleaner, because they came to us wanting every platform. I knew if I didn’t show them the why, they’d never buy the idea. That document needed to be bulletproof. It was and they became the first client at the agency to run a pure single platform account. I watched other members of the creative team pull the same hours, because they wanted clients to stay or to push them to a new level.

You live and die by feedback.

It’s hard being told what clients or even your account team doesn’t like about your work. And as much as we try to not get too attached to what we do, it’s next to impossible to create anything without putting a little part of yourself in it. However you can never expect your work to get any better if you don’t find out what can be done to improve it.

Clients that are vocal can be a nightmare, but a good account manager will make sure the important stuff is thrown down the line to you. Personally, I’d rather that than the radio silent ones, because at least then you know what you’re getting. When a quiet client serves a notice, it’s usually for something that could have been changed if they’d been pushed for feedback… or if you listened to what little they did say.

Know when to call it a day.

I’ve made seven thousand pieces of content.

Seven.
Thousand.
…ish.

I could have stretched to two years, or more. I could have keep pumping out that content and tried for an even ten thousand. With the way the social landscape is changing, there would have definitely been new problems to solve and things to do in the next few months. So why leave? It wasn’t the agency and it definitely wasn’t the people I worked with. In fact I don’t know if I’ll ever get lucky enough to work at another place like Born.

Social media is speed, and it’s probably the most demanding sector of M&A. There’s only so much you can keep moving at that kind of pace, creating that volume of content at any level of quality, before you burn out and it all looks like mud. Once you’ve seen behind the curtain, you’ll never really look at a brand or influencer social account the same way again. Whenever anyone talks about social advertising, you have the dubious benefit of knowing exactly how that works. And much like proper kerning, you’ll regret learning it.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m exiting on the top of my game. I’ve learned a lot and made a tonne of cool stuff, got to work with excellent people and can say that I know what it’s like to go from luxury cars to fast food to office supplies in a three day period.

It’s a perfect time to hang up the gloves and look for something a little slower and more thoughtful.

Until next time,

Thanks for reading.