Matt Navarra, Social Media Consultant

This experience allows deaf kids to online grow in a change in their voice environment to help honk the horn up an divert them, easier to find ham, sexiness and sex circa femus instead it's increasing or declining and how to achieve organic reach and things. I think the key message was really to get closer to your customers and understanding who they are and creating really interesting, shareable, useful content that matches up with what the audience expectations are and will likely perform on their own without much effort. Then you need to get closer to understanding how best to target that audience and using the platforms in the best way possible and having a page strategy that then amplifies a good piece of content because there's nothing worse than trying to spend a huge amount of money to amplify bad content. Because bad content is bad content whatever and you're just going to spend a lot of money and it's not going to generate a huge amount for you. So that was kind of what I was trying to make sure that the audience was understanding. If you look at the figures for organic reach for brands around the world, for different industries over the last three, four, five years, then the numbers have shrunk and that's a natural phenomenon. There's a lot more people, brands using social media. There's only a finite number of social media platforms that reach a large number of people at one time and there's a lot of messaging and noise on these social platforms. These companies are there to make money. The social networks are trying to drive revenue for them, which is ad revenue. It doesn't make sense for them to also keep giving you lots of free reach. So it also would be a factor in why we might have seen a decrease in the amount of organic reach that a company might get. I think it has declined. I don't think it's dead. I think one of the messages I mentioned this afternoon was around there's a higher bar for the quality of content to generate additional reach at low or no cost. And so that's why it's more important than ever to focus on understanding audiences and customers but also creating that really useful, shareable content. Because at the moment, organic reach is really going to be for those really special viral moments or for those really creative and clever campaigns that even for brands that you see in campaigns that have these massive successes of huge viral reach, organic reach, and you think, wow, that's amazing. That has probably been started as a concept that then they had a very clear, defined page strategy to amplify and boost it and to get the ball rolling. It wasn't a case of they got lucky and they had a really cool thing and it went organic and they didn't put any money behind it. Very few campaigns that are viral moments or organic reach successes are not without some sort of page strategy as well. Most of the brands that do really good campaigns that ultimately as a result of being so good and generated a good amount of free organic reach, it tends to come from the brands being able to know what the customer is interested in and what excites them. And then once they know that and what their audience is going to respond like and how to engage with them, it's not just about a campaign that's one way, it's also about how they as a brand engage with their customers. Then a good example is Paddy Power, which is an Irish betting company. They know that their audience is very tribal, so it's very sport, fanatical, they have a certain style of language that they use, the sorts of things that they share. They know what will make their audience laugh, they know what will make their audience angry, and they respond as well as, not just the campaigns, but in their responses, they do that as well. They alter that because their audience is in the UK, a different audience to those in Ireland, their native Ireland. Those companies that are able to tap into the personalities of their audience and then project that as well are going to be successful. Other brands that are very successful tend to be brands that are able to keep on top of what's trending, what people are talking about. These moments that come out, there'd be something silly like a politician does something ridiculous, or another brand makes a big mistake, or there's a TV moment. Those things often can't be planned for, but they can. Some of the ones that come up, you just need to be prepared to be able to execute. A lot of these companies have great workflows and teams to be able to jump on the moment, be able to create some content, and then leverage a page strategy to amplify it, and then they get huge amounts of extra organic reach. The one that keeps coming back all the time tends to be one I mentioned earlier today around companies think that as long as the content's okay and they know a little bit about their customers and their audience, as long as they stick a load of well-targeted ads behind it, then it'll be successful because you've paid loads of money. It doesn't always work like that. You've still got to have great content because if you make me see something because you've paid lots of money to make sure I see it, if I look at it and I still think that's rubbish, I'm either going to be left with a bad impression or I'm not going to do what it is you hope I'm going to do, which is comment, or engage, or share, or buy something. It still comes back to having great content, and some brands still hope and pray that they're going to stick a load of advertising behind it and it'll work quite well. There's a lot of people who use social media for their brand or their business thinking that they have to be on all platforms at all times. When they do that, they get into this vicious cycle of thinking, I haven't got enough resources and time to create content in the amounts I need for all of these platforms. Then they either make really poor quality content because they haven't got enough time or resources to do it for every platform, or they get one piece of good content or average content and then they just copy paste and they push it out to every platform. If you're a customer who's on Instagram, you go for Instagram for a certain type of content or the way it's delivered to you. If you've got a good brand, you'll notice that you'll go to their Facebook page and it'll be either different content or a very different angle of the same kind of content on a different platform. Trying to get out of that bad behavior of sharing all the same things for all platforms would be rectified if they picked which ones are for them. Maybe it's sometimes being brave and saying, actually I just don't think right now this is for us social and that doesn't apply to most brands, but for some I think maybe it does. If you've got a good social media team and you have a good understanding of the social media landscape, it's relatively easy to understand which platforms are best for what sort of things in a broad sense of the way. Content that is to do with life hacks and tips to do with getting a job and employment and entrepreneurial skills and how to build a startup, all that kind of content and that kind of marketing and ads, you'd think LinkedIn. If you've got a great amount of video content, it's longer form video content and maybe lots of serial pieces of content, then you'd be thinking about YouTube and so on and so forth. Some obvious things you would look out for. Then you also look at what your audience is doing. Go back and have a look and see out of all the customers that you know about or if you can find out more about them, which are the social platforms that they're spending most of their time on and what are they doing on those platforms and does that match up with what you can create or what you want to do and can that platform deliver for you? Or then using the platform where most of your audience is. Unless of course your strategy is I don't want the customers I've got already because I'm dealing with them that way already. I want new customers. Then you have to think which platform would hit that demographic with something that I can create that would be useful or would engage them. Then it's thinking about understanding that kind of segment of your audience. You have to do your research, you have to do some analytical work and you have to have a good understanding of the platforms and keep on top of them. Well video is a tricky one because it's so expensive for most companies and it's quite hard to do well. I think a lot of people think they make good video but I think very few actually make really good video consistently at least. I think brands can get again hooked into thinking I have to do video and then making all this video content which is quite expensive and time consuming and then they're disappointed it hasn't done anything. You have to have the expertise not only to film and shoot video and edit video, then you have to have an understanding of how to promote video across different social networks and then how to optimise video because you can have 10 minutes of video content that might say a lot of amazing things but if you put that 10 minutes with a little bit of editing on YouTube and do the same edit on every other platform as you've done and not optimising it per platform then that content will probably struggle to work or it might just work on the one platform you hope it will work on and then the ones you've just copy pasted it to will struggle with. In terms of social video optimisation, it's classic things with social video. People's attention spans for video tend to be quite short and social in general inspires people to be very quick with how they do things. If it is shorter form content, it's all about getting a key part of it right up front, really draw them in those first one or two seconds because that's literally all the time you've got. Great use of thumbnails to something that will pop in your news feed and also clever use of optimisation for the titles and the tags. They're all the basic classic best practices for creating and using video in general. I think in terms of social, I think it's being where your audience is and being in the moment and what I mean by that is not only being on the right platform for where your customers and audiences are likely to be or the ones you wish to target are currently residing but also being on top of what they're talking about, what's interesting to them, what's going on in the world around them that may be something you can hook onto or leverage and keeping on top of those things. So having a good tool or set up to keep on top of what's going on in the world and what your competitors are doing and then having a team that's set up to execute that to be able to deliver quick campaigns. For the things you do slower, the things you have planned for, then you've got plenty of time to really dig into the data and also look at previous success of successful campaigns and can you replicate a successful campaign and then tweak it, improve it and take it to the next level. I think in general social media is going to be an interesting year because we've had a very difficult year for Facebook particularly with data privacy and the introduction of GDPR. I think that users at that peak of understanding now how valuable their information, their data is and are going to be much more guarded and there are going to be more features and functionality within the social networks to be able to let users kind of control that and manage that better. I think we'll see further enhancements to giving that kind of control back to users. I think that messaging bots and messaging apps in general and groups are going to be significant because the people sharing behaviours have changed. People now don't want to share as much as they used to and not into such bigger groups so I think that groups and messaging apps are going to have an explosion further and I think we're going to see Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, most of them have additional functionality to help people create things within that environment and to build bigger communities that they can then share content into. So those are the things that most interest me but I think that people's general use of social media next year is going to make a big change and that's going to be a difficult thing for Facebook and others.