Social Strategy / What Not To Do
Gather ‘round the fire, children, dear readers.
Holds up iPad with 8-hour version of Darth Vader’s funeral pyre playing, joints creaking and popping in time with the flames.
I am here to discuss the ancient texts of social media strategy as an Elder of the Internet who has Seen Things (source: I managed social for a company that developed the first analytics for Tumblr). As a wizened crone retired from life as a Social Media High Priestess Manager, I’ve also tapped into the youthful maiden energy of current SMMs and creators for their hottest takes on What Not To Do.
If you make great sacrifices to appease the Gods of the Algorithm each day with frustratingly inconsistent returns, fear not, my child — theirs is eternally a fickle love. Let us ensure you are not making the gravest of errors that offend them.
In our Social Era
If we think of social media and its accompanying strategy as eras (geological eras, sorry, Swifties), it breaks down into something like this.
- The Precambrian, or Presocial: The Internet was lurching to life, continents and atmosphere forming from research laboratories eager to network computers together. Early precursors to chat rooms emerged, email was born, and nerd life flourished in the great global seas of fucking around, long before we’d begin to find out.
The true Elders of the Internet were so crowned (I’m not that old). - Paleozoic Era, or Early Social Media: Ah, the halcyon early days of life Online (the mid-to-late 90s) where you could easily be a demon in a chat room, wooing an innocent teenage girl and convincing her to build you a robot body.
This was life before doomscrolling eternal social feeds (wait, are we in purgatory now?). We were but trilobites on dial-up, baby, forwarding each other AOL chain email surveys lest we invoke a lifetime of bad luck (wait, is that WHY we’re in purgatory now??).
Beautiful ancient ferns messaged their friends on AOL, Yahoo, and MSN, before teaching themselves to code HTML for their Livejournals. A continental divide was coming, but everyone was blissfully unaware. - Mesozoic Era, or the Age of Social Dinosaurs: The titans of social media as we know it emerged from the shallow seas in the early aughts: LinkedIn from the primordial ooze in 2003, followed by Myspace, Facebook (‘04), YouTube and Reddit (‘05), Twitter (‘06), and Tumblr (‘07). Instagram and Snapchat followed in the 2010s, with TikTok evolving the lineup in 2017.
We saw the rise and fall of many social networking species along the way: Vine, Google+, and the two weeks where my entire office shouted “Yo” at each other non-stop before forgetting the app ever existed. - Cenozoic Era, or Our Current Social Hellscape: Moloch would be thriving here, honestly. He only wants your love. (And affiliate links?)
Throughout these eras, some tenets of social strategy have always remained true. You need to understand who your audience is, where they prefer to spend their time, and how they like to interact in those spaces. Influential people rise and fall from different platforms, sometimes finding ways to establish lasting careers and sometimes cementing themselves as cautionary tales on Cameo.
Every platform has its quirks, and it's notoriously difficult to move an audience from one place to another, to rebuild from scratch if your original house got huffed and puffed and blown all the way down — from the mercurial gods or your own posting hubris.
But what’s the worst of the worst? What are the truly Bad Moves, Universally Agreed Upon? One man’s slanderous trash is another’s like and subscribe fodder, right? True enough, but the best approach to breaking the rules is first to understand them and their reason for existing.
Same energy.
The Rules (Not the Weird 90s Dating Book)
In the beginning, brands had no idea what to do with social media; they would literally let the intern run it, since no one really knew what it was for yet (posting photos of one's lunch?). They were lurching around, trying everything, earnestly engaging for several months, only to abandon their accounts when the person previously running them moved on to another job.
Building up an engaged following took exactly three things:
- Consistency
- Quality content (we did move beyond the grainy lunch photos)
- Responsiveness
This remains largely true, except that there is more noise to contend with than in 2012 or even 2017. That’s arguably the year everything changed: Wendy’s started roasting their customers in a once-clever move that’s become the played-out brand playbook ever since.
What not to do: Run the Wendy’s Playbook circa 2017. It’s not a one-size-fits-all. Sometimes, customers just want to be able to ask a question while they’re in the middle of doomscrolling and aren’t looking to get roasted by their local cooling and heating business.
Today, the social media manager is a jaded professional who is very tired of hearing “give the intern a raise” jokes. Young professionals have grown up on social media in a way that previous generations have not. Their rules about what not to do are more granular, more aggrieved. They may not have been able to eat solid foods during the rise and fall of the early social empires, but they’ve grown to adulthood on the ashes of those same domains.
A current YouTube manager for a tech company shared her list of grievances, echoed by a social media manager who also moonlights as a creator. This is their take on what not to do, and it applies to every kind of brand, including businesses of all sizes and creators.
1-second Reels
This is an annoyingly transparent bid to game the algorithm that once again hungers for video.
Any kind of super short Reel
A related move is to put all the information in the caption. That means viewers are forced to listen to the same insipid song or audio on loop while scrolling to read the tiny print, which is not an ideal user experience.
It’s also a great way to drop your engagement as fans and followers decide they’d rather move on than deal with it.
Follow-for-follow
This tactic of the early social days has not yet died out. It is a move long overdue for extinction, signaling desperation as you type with your T-Rex arms, trying to stay relevant.
“Follow-for-follow?? FOLLOW-FOR-FOLLOW??? PLEASE, I AM ALL ALONE HERE.”
It’s not a cute look.
Cold messaging
Social media, at its best, means being — get this, social — and forming genuine connections. You don’t have to be best friends with all 5.24 billion social media users worldwide, but don’t make it completely transactional either.
Build rapport before making an ask (like a free sample if you’re a creator or a collab with another brand or creator), or risk getting blocked, banned, and damaging your reputation.
Engagement pods
While these can be done right, they’re usually also shallow and transactional. Again, build genuine relationships online and offline.
There’s no shortcut to building real engagement with your audience.
Not disclosing paid partnerships
Some creators attempt this, hoping their suggestions will have a greater impact if they appear more organic. The problem is that you are almost always caught, and once you break your audience’s trust, it is tough to rebuild.
It’s also illegal. The FTC requires disclosure, and there are plenty of resources available to ensure you’re doing it right, no matter what kind of brand presence you have online.
Stealing content/reposting without credit
You know those huge meme accounts that always post the extremely lame disclaimer “DM for credit”? Do not be like them.
Yes, content creation is hard work. That’s why it’s a whole job!
It’s All Just a Little Bit of History Repeating
Pull your feet up out of the tar pits, dear reader, because now you’re equipped to move out of the muck and into better, lusher social lands, equipped with the knowledge that platforms will continuously change what they ask of you.
A strategy is never one-and-done, except at its core: remaining true to your brand values and forging authentic connections with your audience as much as your little T-Rex arms allow.