The Social Roast - September 2021
Hey folks,
One hundred and twenty eight. That's how many of you have trusted me with providing you with informative and - dare I say - entertaining commentary on the world of social media marketing.
When I started this newsletter I had no clue that in a little over six months I'd have 128 followers. I honestly thought I'd have LOADS more. Like in the thousands at least. This is going so much less well than I anticipated. But the point is: I'm grateful. Thank you.
And cheers for all the comments and thumbs up on these things. It's good to know I'm not just screaming into a void. I'm screaming at people who seem to actually appreciate it.
Also I realise this is VERY LATE. I offer no apologies for this.
September is always a weird time of the year. It’s not really anything, is it? Summer’s kind of over, but the official Spooky Season has yet to begin. All there really is to do is catch a seasonal cold and wait for everything to blow over.
And so it is with social media. I feel like a lot happened this September, but also nothing much. Still, it’s my solemn duty to report what happened. And I am at least a man of my word.
I kicked off the month by slinging my bones down to a three-day social conference, Social Day (inaccurately named, in my opinion). And I’ve always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with these things. It’s great to see what other people are up to, and it’s even sometimes good to… *shudder* …network. And it’s pretty much the kind of thing you have to be seen to be doing to tick a box if you want to get paid more money at work.
But they also consistently suck! It’s all big brands with huge budgets with a million agencies. I can learn nothing from these people as their stories aren’t relevant to my situation. I’m sure I could do very cool things with a team of more than two people, or a million pounds, but I don’t! I’ve had to spend months working on a £200 budget proposal to send gifts to customers (facing questions of how we’ll measure ROI the whole time).
So I end up just passive-aggressively tweeting about the conferences instead.
But this time, I actually left feeling a little inspired. Inspired to start my OWN conference. No big brands or budgets allowed. I’m calling it the Scrappy Social Conference, and I think there’s a good 30% chance I might actually make it happen!
Right now, I’m in the gauging interest phase. If it sounds like something you’d be into, let me know! It’ll most likely be a night in a pub or event space in London somewhere (in-person to begin with). You can also register here, and I’ll let you know if/when it happens.
In other updates, here is a tweet that is BASED ON TRUE EVENTS.
So that’s my news. Let’s talk about not me for a bit.
Twitter introduces Super Follows
Twitter is rolling out yet another monetisation feature, following paid Spaces and Tip Jars (anyone actually seen/used these yet?).
Super Follows are a Patreon/OnlyFans/Substack style subscription feature that lets you access… super tweets? I mean, sure.
For me, the whole point of tweeting is to try and get as many people as possible to see your content. So I don’t really know why you’d want to restrict it to a tiny audience. And I don’t know if I’d pay to follow anyone’s super tweets myself.
Newsletters I get, long-form content feels worth paying for. But a 280-character tweet about your breakfast? I don’t know. But hey, who knows!
I guess this’ll be more useful for individual creators than for brands. But some enterprising brand will probably come up with some clever use for it. Get thinking!
Another thing Twitter is working on is improved safety controls:
I guess this is good? But why can’t they just… prevent harmful interactions in the first place? If they can auto-block harassment, why not just… do that for everyone by default?
Having a toggle means I have to log onto Twitter each day and decide if I want to see harassment or not. I guess having the choice is… good? For some reason??
Apparently, the smiley face emoji is aggressive 🙂
Don’t put on a happy face! Are you using the smiley emoji all wrong? | Emojis | The Guardian The classic grinning emoji has once more changed its meaning – at least amongst gen Zers. So what is it communicating now – and what should you be using instead?
I did not know this. I have made a lot of enemies.
Instagram clear up some hashtag confusion
Hashtags have long been a way to increase the discoverability of your posts. Or so everyone said. And it led to a situation where every post was filled with the worst kind of hashtags.
Thankfully that died out as people realised they could just put the hashtags in the top comment instead, keeping the caption clean. Well, it turns out that’s no good either. n this post from their Creators account, they explain that your post’s hashtags need to be in the caption to show up in search. Oops!
I’ve never actually bothered with hashtags at all. Maybe I should, but they feel like one of those growth hacks that aren’t actually any good for the health of your page. Sure, a few extra folks saw your post because you used the #sunset on it, but then what? Do they stick around and follow?
My advice is always the same: create good content, share it in the right places, and the followers will come. If you’re trying to optimise your hashtags, you’re focussing on the wrong bit.
Just a really great response from the NHS to an anti-vaxxer
Really glad this didn’t get deleted. (The original tweet read "you can shove your covid vaccine up your arse".)
It’s good that the team behind the NHS account can get away with this kind of thing. And get vaxxed ffs, folks.
We need to talk about the PrettyLittleThing 9/11 post
I’m not going to repost it here, but you probably saw it anyway. A PLT post on 9/11 with a pic of the towers overlaid with a caption… in full brand colours and font.
It was just pretty poor taste. And there was no need for PLT to do anything at all. So it’s a somewhat confusing piece of content from start to finish.
Many folks were quick to point the finger at PLT’s new celebrity Creative Director, Molly-Mae Hague. I don’t know how involved she is with the always-on social content team, and I doubt that one of her first moves as CD would be to commission a 9/11 tribute.
The lesson here, I guess, is… don’t do this? Brands can participate in the commemoration of things, but it’s essential to not make it all about you. And sometimes, the best thing to post is nothing.
Biscuit posting is the hot new marketing trend
There is nothing more tedious than biscuit chat on Twitter. I’ve lived through so many World Cups of Biscuits in my time, and there’s a particular sub-section of twee British Twitter that inevitably goes nuts over it. Enter Macmillan to get in on the action:
They knew exactly what they were doing here, so kudos to them. It got exactly the right people angry, and the engagement numbers speak for themselves.
The genius masterstroke was the inclusion of Weetabix, though. Weetabix is not a biscuit. It’s just not.
What is it about Weetabix that makes it so effective for this kind of chaos marketing? (Remember the beans?) It’s like a catalyst in a chemical reaction but for social media. Put a Weetabix in it, and you’ll get crazy numbers. Food for thought.
Speaking of food, here’s another example of using food to kick off an argument on Twitter. See also: the scone debate and ‘do you call it a roll or a bap?’
Some context on no context
So, this is kind of interesting (to me, at least). The official Sex Education account has rebranded as a ‘no context’ account.
’No context’ accounts are typically accounts fans make of shows they like. All they do is share random lines/screens from the shows, but they’re very popular.
But the show itself co-opting what is typically a fan-driven content endeavour is a new one to me. And on the main account itself, too.
On the one hand, this shows a distinct savviness about how fans perceive the show. And why not get ahead of the fan reaction and own it? Or does that rob the fanbase of something?
And what does it say about how the show is produced, almost designed to create viral moments with an intended audience of eyes on social rather than people watching the episodes?
Definitely overthinking this. But it’s a first to me.
A/B test your organic Facebook posts
FINALLY! This is incredibly exciting to me, but I’ll provide a little explainer if it’s all jargon to you.
The problem with organic social is that it’s tough to do experiments. With paid social, you can do it really easily — just target two similar groups with a piece of content and change a variable. You’ll soon learn which line of copy works better. Or you can try switching out the graphic or adding a video. Since nobody will see all the posts together, you can run different versions of posts side-by-side at the same time and try all these things out.
With organic posts, you can’t do that. Your post kind of has to be the way it is. And sure, you can get some learnings from trying different posting methods over time, and you’ll learn what generally works. But you can never really identify the single variable for a post.
So for years, I’ve dreamt of having a tool that would let you do testing for organic posts. And I think Facebook have just launched it. Their new post testing tool lets you run a few different versions of a post for a bit before it picks a ‘winner’ to be the one that actually ends up on your feed.
Here’s it in action for a post I was doing about Monzo’s new pay-from-Pots feature. I changed the post copy as the variable.
And it worked a treat! I can see us using this for basically every Facebook post from now on.
Let’s talk about mcdOalds
In short, TikToker Emily Zugay has been doing redesigns of corporate logos in silly styles. This inevitably caught the attention of various brands until finally, one of the biggest on the planet, McDonalds got involved. And they made Emily’s logo their actual profile picture on Twitter.
Kudos to McDonalds for actually putting it on main, even if it’s changed back now. Guess the brand team won that battle.
But it’s an exciting moment of separate social networks crossing over. I imagine a lot of people saw the tweet first, with absolutely no context. But you’re probably going to start seeing a lot more of this, trends starting over on TikTok making their way over to more mainstream social, with an assumed knowledge that you know what it’s about.
Because, oh yeah, there are a BILLION people on TikTok now.
And while we’re talking about McDonalds (McTalking?), here’s a customer service fail by them:
Let’s talk about Thursday
Thursday is a UK dating app, and their quirk is that the app only works on Thursdays. And they’re currently running a huge brand campaign that’s lighting up marketing LinkedIn.
These are once again proving a theory I often put forward in these roundups: the audience of out-of-home (billboards, buses) campaigns is not the people on the street seeing them. It’s those peoples’ followers on social media.
These ads are deliberately designed as jokes. They want you to take a photo of them and post them on social media.
Which I think raises an interesting question of why these ads need to exist in the first place. Why go to the expense of printing and placing big billboard ads in real life if what matters is the shareable digital asset? You might as well just mock up a billboard instead; it’ll have the same effect. Expect to see brands doing this a LOT in the future.
Also:
So that was September!
So that was September. Thanks for reading my thoughts about it. You’re the best, allegedly.
If you enjoyed this, feel free to let me know. Or better yet: tell a friend. You can read more of my monthly reviews and other thoughts here 👇
Confessions of an Anti-Social Marketer – Medium — medium.com I’ve worked in roles across Customer Service, Community and Marketing for the best part of a decade. I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe.