Many businesses feel pressured to be on social media, often viewing it as an easy marketing win. Their competitors are doing it, they heard about another business getting great sales from TikTok, or they need the brand exposure to make sure everyone knows about them.

While social media can offer these benefits, it requires a thoughtful strategy and consistent effort to succeed. Social media is not a one-size-fits-all solution and without a well-defined strategy and a creative approach to the content you’re putting out, brands can easily end up wasting resources or worse, damaging their reputation.

An easy trap

While social media is enticing and an easy channel to get your brand out there, it’s also an easy trap to fall into. Once your brand is online, you need to keep it active – creating content, posting regularly and engaging your audience.

Content is everything on social media. It’s what makes your brand stand out, builds your community and when its executed well, brings in customers and drives sales.

The problem is that content requires strategy and creativity – elements that are often overlooked and replaced with posts of repurposed ads, overly-branded images, generic images or the same stock photography as their competitors.

Content needs to be created with a purpose specific to the social channel it’s posted on and that audience.

Organic to placement

When creating content, consider your objectives, target audience and whether it adds value. Consumers are on social media to be entertained and while they know they’ll be served ads through promotion, social media channels aren’t a space for these.

Your organic content needs to be exactly that, organic to placement. If your brand isn’t offering something entertaining or valuable on your social media pages, it may not belong on social media.

Let’s consider the cost of social media. Whether you’re paying for a seat (or likely a few) in your team to create and manage the content or outsourcing this to an agency, managing a social media presence requires investment. If all you’re doing is posting content nobody wants to see and boosting it, you’re shouting into an echo chamber.

The playbook

Instead, your ads could be placed on the back end and be exactly that, ads in a conversion funnel serving a purpose. When you post a piece of content, ask yourself: would I stop scrolling for a second to take it in? If the answer is no, don’t post it.

In most cases, your teams understand this. They’ll advise on this but face pressure to add excessive branding (you don’t need logos on organic posts, your brand name and logo are always shown in the account name), push harder for sales or add more text to the post.

If you’re going to be on social media, trust your team to create authentic content.

Some of the best social media accounts around run independently from marketing approval flows, allowing the team to work within defined boundaries but keep things interesting by being reactive and following a playbook which outlines how the brand comes to life on social media.

Churning content

If your brand isn’t committed to adding value in the social space or committed to doing it right, you’ll either stop posting and seem inactive or find yourself churning content that’s being seen by nobody.

The questions every marketer should be asking themselves: What am I doing on social media? How am I going to ensure I do it right?

Brands shouldn’t feel obligated to be on social media without a clear purpose. It’s better to have no presence than to have a poorly managed one. Focus on defining your goals, creating quality content, and exploring alternative marketing strategies.

By making strategic decisions, your brand can achieve long-term success and maintain a positive reputation.