Skip to main content

Paid reach.

Dear brands and custodians thereof:

It's probably quite true that organic reach is (almost) dead. I've seen it in action: corporate Facebook posts just don't get a lot of traction. No matter how well-written they are, or how engaging the accompanying visuals / videos / whatnots are. And the same holds true for other posts.

So I totally understand why you'd want to pay money to promote your posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and feature your videos using TrueView on YouTube. Or invest in PPC (even though it looks so ugly).

Still: don't put your money behind mediocre, or even bad content.

It just makes you look worse.

I'm not going to name and shame, but there are so many brands that put money behind not especially engaging content (to say nothing of its aesthetic merit).

So my point is: Make sure you have good content before pushing it out. With well-crafted words and effective visuals. And these need to be underwritten by strong ideas and creative concepts.

Because at the end, it's the underlying concepts that matter.

Update after watching Tara Reed's video Twitter Deep Dive: How to Use Social Media to 10x Your Website Traffic, where she recommends the following:
A 14-day experiment [...] when you take your top blog posts and for 14 days, every single day you post 14 posts, different blog posts. You can mix them up. But every day you are posting 14 links to a blog post with some interesting, unique content. The reason you want to do this is that the average user spends just 13 minutes on Twitter at a time. So the chances of them seeing more than one of those posts in your day is really slim. So you want to do 14. It may feel like a lot for your company and for your brand, but really that's where you want to be in order to really squeeze out all that value on your social media site.

Please just don't. The abundance of posts will make your own Twitter feed look spammy, and don't forget that some poor social media exec will have to write out all the permutations of tweets promoting the same blog post in oh-so-many different ways (also, "to 10x" doesn't really hold up grammatically). Just put a little bit of money behind it and see how your target audiences react to what you put out.

Comments

Post a comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Raj Patel’s “The Value of Nothing” in an advertising context.

The more I read about the theory of advertising (which is plenty, thanks to my upcoming IPA Eff Test), the more it seems just inextricably linked to other disciplines. Psychology and sociology are pretty much a given – the better we understand how people’s minds and social structures work, the better we can sell to them. But there’s also a huge economic dimension to advertising. Specifically, so much of advertising relates to the process of value creation. Though my Comparative Literature course included ample Marx, Engels, Veblen, and Benjamin, it’s a concept that I’m still working to fully understand. That’s why I was very happy to come across Raj Patel’s The Value of Nothing . At its core, it’s a fundamental examination of why things cost what they do – though it also goes far beyond that as the subtitle, “How to reshape market society and redefine democracy,” suggests. One of the best parts is where Patel explains why “a burger grown from beef raised on clear-cut forest should rea
Post a comment
Read more

Stylus talk review: "The groups that will shape the commercial landscape in 2019."

Trends and insights researcher Stylus gave a presentation on  "The groups that will shape the commercial landscape in 2019"  on Tuesday, February 12 – here's my roundup (with extensive commentary). TL;DR: Interesting in terms of hearing about big and small trends (and the Zeitgeist in general), but also relatively niche and very US-focused. It was definitely about the "haves" rather than "have nots" – though that makes commercial sense I suppose. Also: I'm not entirely sold on the figures cited... Still, events like these are definitely worthwhile because with the insane amounts of information out there, anything that can shed light on what some of the distinct trends are, and where we're headed, makes the infoscape a bit more navigable. The speakers' main points: Don't just focus on Millennials and consider the "new" lifestyles which people are embracing – specifically... 1) "Supercharged Kids" Basically: the rise
Post a comment
Read more

Digested Read: How (Not) To Plan, Section 2.

Product, Price, Place! Introduction Marketers tend to focus overly much on Promotion, ignoring other three Ps. 2.1 Brands Can(not) Live Forever "Brands don't have life cycles," a theory which the longevity of Heinz, Kellogg's, and Hovis apparently support. "If there is any 'life cycle,' it's a brand management cycle." Phase 1: Brand launch with strong marketing support and ROI. Phase 2: Sales plateau – marketing needs to maintain and depend the brand and gets less management attention; budgets are cut. Phase 3: The cuts lead to declining sales; brand owners retaliate with price promotions which deliver short-term sales but damage the brand image (further affecting sales). The Boston Matrix of Cash Cows and Stars should be applied to categories, not brands. Checklist "Aim for brand immortality" Always invest in continuous advertising [Comment: A recurrent theme ] Share and Voice and Share of Market can help you estimate how much
Post a comment
Read more