Are you trying to control an uncontrollable thing?

How searching for certainty in social media marketing leads you to all the wrong places.

Possibly the worst place on the planet to accidentally find yourself doomscrolling is Instagram. It takes one curious click to find yourself surrounded by an assortment of pale coloured posts with neatly templated white writing you can barely distinguish in the post, let alone between accounts.

Everyone is branding hard, trotting out the “it’s been a while since I introduced myself” opening line, and offering to fix all your business problems for low, low prices, and “but wait, there’s more” action.

This is the biting part of inflation. Where we’re raw and rubbed. The cash stocked neatly in the bank account has had a significant nudge. And there’s only so much blood you’ve got to keep you going.

Meanwhile, the mythical creature called the algorithm is encouraging you to go viral, telling you that you are only so many posts or likes or some variation of their feature usage from unlocking some amazing gamified achievement. Trying to find the magical system that unlocks the social media casino winning formula sounds appealing because you might get seen by the 2% of your audience that’s still vaguely interested. Maybe. That’s not if they’ve already given up and debunked to Threads.

If me, a community manager by trade and dirty marketer at heart, are watching this all unfold with disbelief, I can only imagine some poor suburban plumber feels. Imagine having your arm and camera up places no-one ever wants to consider. Now imagine how you might feel facing Instagram’s insistence to live stream it.

We are overdue for a rebellion. And that means:

·       Walking away from the gamification traps

·       Moving away from prettily branded social media posts

·       Finding out where the audience is

·       Asking yourself what legwork you want to reduce

·       Creating hybrid (real life and online) experiences  

·       Doing things differently  

The algorithm may be breathing heavily in your ear about potential wins if only, you’d proliferate, pontificate, and never leave the platform. But remember, it’s the sideline, not the whole ballgame.

We know this because community existed well before the techbros even got a look in.

Image: graffiti reads “let’s love our community” in an under bridge walkway.

Community: You’re soaking in it

Social media platforms claim they make creating communities simpler. I’d argue though that we’ve always been good at it. They simply made the creation, assembly, and response back, far more visible.

That was unique because up until that point, marketers, politicians, and anyone that needed a volume of eyeballs to understand or support their activities had assumed they were dealing with “a silent majority” they could “broadcast” to.

It’s easy to believe the audience has no opinion if you don’t offer anything to listen to it with.   

Instead, we soon realised people were loud. Really loud. And a really imperfect way of expressing it. Digitising the megaphone let the inside voices out.

Marketers, businesses, and even the platforms, have been playing catch up ever since.

Which is why we developed some unhealthy coping mechanisms. While consumer sentiment, brand recall, buying intentions, and future sales remain akin to astrology in their true predictive powers, we convinced ourselves we could:

·       Create schedules

·       Game the algorithm

·       Newsjack trends

·       Template everything

·       Create consumable content out of the seemingly banal

A posts existence, brief interactions, analytics, and gamification convinced us we were making progress via gamification.

It’s marvellously ingenious on the platform’s part when you think about it.  

Fast forward to now. We never realised we can be exhausted by our desire to gain exposure. Or that platforms would manipulate our desperation for it with pay-to-play, bloated feature sets, and an insistence we never leave.

Sunk cost fallacy further complicates it. We’ve invested too much time and energy into social media to back out now.

But pretty won’t pay the rent. Nor will listening to the platforms about how to use the platforms effectively. Take Instagram advice currently:

·       5 to 7 Stories a week

·       1 to 2 Single Posts a week

·       2 to 3 Carousels a week

·       3 to 4 Reels a week

 It reads like a digital hokey-pokey.

Increasingly, the advice to show up, dabble in trends, and screw around with platform features feels like a platform’s version of workplace presenteeism.

But they gave us a leave pass, too. We can get high off the creative bump and get excited by the analytics. And ignore all the advice to come around for another addictive toot when it doesn’t pan out with the magic words, “oh, it’s just the algorithm”.

A little business reflection is needed:  

·       Where do your leads actually come from?

·       What kinds of marketing reduces your legwork in places like overcoming objections, customer service, and onboarding?

·       Is your social media telling your followers that the solution you provide addresses a problem worth solving?

·       Exactly how much awareness do you really need?

Yet despite all this, I don’t believe any platform is dead. Not even Meta’s version of Facebook or Instagram, that appears to be rather convincingly driving itself repeatedly into the ground.

I am however convinced it’s time to shake things up a little and:

·       Convert social media fans to newsletter sign ups. Grab tight onto as any email addresses as fast as you can by any means possible

·       Burn your social media schedule. It’s giving you false comfort about what you are achieving 

·       Become adaptable enough to forgo post approval. Instead, hire community managers that are nimble, adaptable and quick-witted enough to know the digital season that greets them every morning   

·       Divert social media energy to one or two existing platforms. Make a big deal out of leaving and why, leave lighthouse posts to tell the stragglers where the new camp is

·       Go hybrid, intimate, and velvet rope, or GTFO. Customers want the intimacy of social media without the social broadcasting and advertising. Be prepared to do small batch events, experiences, and platform engagements if you want to give real meaning digitally 

·       Get all frontier and sh#t, rebuilding on the new wave. Because nobody except Meta is convinced the Zoomers are coming back to Facebook or Instagram again

Are you brave enough to ditch the certainty and get excited?

Do you want to work more effectively with freelancers within your organisation? Find out why I’m collecting all the thoughts and impressions of Australian businesses when it comes to using freelance talent. Your views are the missing piece of the puzzle - share them now!

Dip your toe in with a little tough love and social media realness with me with my Social Media Community Health Plan. It’s guaranteed to get you away from feeding algorithms and nourishing customers. All while you leverage them for your purposes instead of being some exercise in analytic data mining.

Come and hear me speak in Melbourne at Swarm Conference about communities of practice and why we need to get scrappy, inventive, and the hell away from certainty to weather the change that’s coming in the next five years. Find out more about me in this professional profile.

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And let's build communities around our businesses that withstand whatever the digital world throws at us.