5 Essential Moves for Post-Social Growth

MADE LXXVIII: 5 Essential Moves for Post-Social Growth

Success on old social media depended on a balanced signal-to-noise ratio. The percentage of content that people wanted had to reasonably exceed the content people didn’t want. If generally balanced, users would associate your content in the same positive feeling that they saw post of their high school best friend’s baby announcement. The network effects worked for you. 

Today, the inverse is true. Next to your blog about how high-net-worth families manage estate taxes is someone’s a rant about the January 6th trials followed by a spam ad for penis enlargement pills. Just like in 1995 you wouldn’t put the billboard for your elite consulting services next to Studly’s Sex Emporium, the same must apply now. What you're next to says something about what you are.

In industry speak, we call this “brand risk.” And on nearly all platforms its higher than it’s ever been.

But it’s not just the quality of the content that’s gone down, the algorithm that serves that content has had a nearly a decade of Ls, killing its credibility. Today’s internet surfers don’t want what the algo is serving, even if that thing it’s serving is you. Even on platforms like LinkedIn, so far free from a big credibility hit, anecdotal complaints abound about reduced reach, lower engagement. “It’s just not like it used to be.”

No, it certainly isn’t.

Getting your brand on social media, not so long ago, was table stakes in the war for buyer attention. Even in B2B. I spend the better part of the 2000s trying to convince sales people, financial advisors, and CEOs to just make the leap and get on there and start posting. So for me to make the switch to, “What if we don’t need this anymore?” wasn’t easy.

But here I stand. The data consistently shows a shift from growth to cyclical decline in the big platforms.

And even though they will likely retain their user counts (nobody really “quits.”), the real soft metric that matters is trust. Trust-based measures are real leading indicators. And it’s not good.

As you can see in the above chart, across all ages, people don’t like what the algo is serving. The scandals of the late 2010s, have done carnage to the feeds’ perception. People simply don’t believe the platforms are offering them truth or even value. This week, due to a change in Canadian law, all of our friends up north will no longer get ANY news on Facebook properties. None. Zero. 

No you’re probably not a news platform. And you may have your hot takes on the value of legacy media. But here’s what matters: having your content adjacent to legitimate news sources moves you up the credibility curve. In the absence of that, you’re trapped between “look what my cat did” and “here is a blurry photo of dangerous man driving in the neighborhood. Has anyone called the police?”

LinkedIn is no exception. As the platform has attempted to pivot to the “Creator Economy” it has prioritized selfies and self-help serenades better suited to after school specials. The explosion of “How I earned $1M in the lat five minutes and you can too” may help Microsoft monetize the platform, but it will do very little for you. 

Losing the Youth

Whether you are targeting 25 year olds as buyers or employees doesn’t matter. The trendlines for where we find value and platform the zeitgeist is decided by Gen Z. And they are aggressively moving away from the traditional platforms. Usage has entered cyclical decline broadly, and that’s before Twitter imploded. The only increased usage comes in two forms:

1. Messaging Apps: Snap and WhatsApp are often categorized as social media (they have some shared featuers: sharing images, video, networking with friends, comment streams) but are more accurately defined as multimedia messaging apps, lacking the public platform of the old dogs: Facebook, Classic IG, Twitter, LinkedIn.
2. Short-Form Video: Tech evangelists use the rise of TikTok to prove social isn’t dying it’s changing. But TikTok is clear that it’s not competing in that space. It’s competing with Netflix. TikTok and its ripoff Instagram Reels (responsible for much of IG’s growth in the last four years) are primarily entertainment platforms with an engagement feature. 95% of brands are neither ready nor skilled to compete in an entertainment space.

I watched an industry—financial services—willfully disdain and ignore Millennials as they traversed from their twenties to their forties. The industry now struggles with G2 talent, is entering an era of cyclical consolidation, and has a leadership gap a mile wide between the founders and the next gen. To the point where PE-backed aggregation is the only solution for many.

Doing the same with Gen Z will lead to perillous results. In contrast to their older siblings, Zoomers enter the workforce not looking for shiny tech objects, but looking for health, stability, and trust. Something that the Silicon-Valley powered social web world the Millennials built is ill-suited to provide.

What to Do Now

The platforms and their billions of users aren’t going anywhere. And for some brands they still may play a useful role in your growth strategy. But where before simple presence did a baseline job, now skill matters. Spamming the internet with links to your blog or podcast will not do the job. 

Here's how to make the turn from what's now to what's next:

1. Build a Client-First Content System - This is easier than it sounds once you change your mindset. Instead of trying to write for clicks or algorithms, take the best advice you give to real people and make it available to the public. Your content system isn’t a series of clickable headlines anymore, it’s a learning zone for people who want to know what it’s like to work with you before they buy.
2. Use the Platforms, But Smartly - Some skill is required here. The platforms hate value. They want entertainment and distraction. So you’ve got to create sugar candy versions of what you do (video sound bytes, light versions of heavy topics, a sardonic social media voice). This should only be a bridge supplement to your primary distribution: email newsletters, podcasts, video channels, etc. Places where you own the content and the decisions of who it goes to.
3. Move People Off-Platform to Owned Channels - You’ve got to engage ON PLATFORM before people are going to engage you on your owned channels (your newsletter, website, podcast, etc.) As people enjoy the appetizer of who you are online they are more willing to go in for the full meal by subscribing to your high value core content (newsletter, knowledge articles, how-to videos, podcasts, webinars)
4. Move Engagement Toward Intent - People who like to engage you for free are the most likely people to engage you for money. Commenters, consistent readers, people who reference your content on your intake forms are moving their way toward you. Your go-to-market program should use first-party data to recognize those people and build increasingly custom and personal ways to connect with them.
5. Tie Revenue to Engagement and Content Quality - Marketing should have a direct line into revenue planning. But you need first-party data (how people are engaging your owned content, not the platforms) to successfully understand what is working and what isn’t. Your Client-First content should have a very long-tail to it, versus just playing for Google. As you build your resource library of value, the data will improve and the connection to revenue will improve with it.

A lot of your peers are going to spend the next 2-3 years wasting money trying to make Facebook, LinkedIn and Google work like they did in 2018. NOT engaging in that waste is one of the great competitive advantages you have. Start building the bridge now to a post-social economic world. The social web has peaked, and you’ll need to grab a different lift to go to the next level.

Not sure where to begin?

I’ll be doing an invite-only training of our Client-First Content System this month. Send me an email or comment on this post if you want to be included. Time and date will depend on participants.