The current situation, pain points and suggestions for brand social media operations

After researching nearly 20 brands’ social media at home and abroad, I found the current situation of brands doing social media:

Brand social media is difficult to do. Compared with content-based self-media, brand social media has boring (vague) personalities, monotonous content, lack of originality, and low interest and practicality.

Some practitioners in the content industry have suggested that "brands should quickly shut down Weibo, WeChat and Douyin." They believe that most brand official accounts are poorly operated and should be closed quickly.

Of course, this statement is extreme. There are also social media in foreign countries. If social media has no value, why do they continue to update it?

Therefore, whether a brand should operate social media depends on whether the brand wants to gain revenue from social media and the return on investment (ROI).

Currently, the brands active on social media are basically domestic and international brands, such as "Xiaomi Mobile Phone", "Durex", "Dell Computer", "Haier", etc.

As well as the internet celebrity brands that have emerged in recent years, such as "Three Squirrels", "Perfect Diary", and "Yuanqi Forest".

So the question is, are small brands (startup brands) that are not included in the above range suitable for operating branded social media?

The author has worked in two e-commerce companies. E-commerce is an industry that attaches great importance to ROI, and everything has to be supported by data. At that time, there was no concept of Taobao Live. Although many e-commerce companies had brand social media, they did not invest resources and manpower into it. They generally did not pay enough attention to it, and social media was only at the level of being maintained by someone.

These bosses generally believe that since spending money may not necessarily produce immediate results (benefits), it would be better not to spend a penny.

The result is that every year on Double 11, they rack their brains to get traffic. The problem is that traffic is so expensive now. Whether it is hiring KOC to advertise or buying traffic from Taobao, it is a huge expense.

Moreover, these traffics are basically a one-time deal. After the traffic is used up, the company still has no traffic. Only then does the company's boss remember to build his own "traffic pool". They began to recruit talents who understood social media, but the problem was that there were too few people who truly understood social media in the market.

Even if you can find it, it is difficult to increase corporate traffic by one person alone, because the era of generating traffic without spending money is over.

Let’s talk about the short video traffic that brand owners have been paying attention to recently.

Douyin is popular, Kuaishou live streaming is popular, and many brands selling goods want to get some traffic for their own use. But the brand doesn't understand short videos. Asking a professional organization to shoot a short video may cost tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the money may be wasted. It is hard to make up your mind to form a team by yourself, after all, short videos are not the main business of the company. In recent years, the economy has been in a downturn, but rent and labor costs have been growing steadily. The boss of the company is worried.

The current status of many brands is: they want to make short videos, but they cannot build a team in a short time, and the company’s old employees dare not touch it. If they don’t do it well, they may be laid off and lose their main business.

Few brands have gained traffic through short videos. The author has studied a home improvement company. When Douyin first became popular, it organized a Douyin operation team and invested heavily in short videos. Now it has become the number one in this category, with over 10 million fans.

In response to the above phenomenon, I put forward the following views and suggestions, hoping to inspire friends engaged in brand communication:

The key point of social communication is that the brand should lower its profile and become a good friend of fans. The vast majority of brand accounts have no personality, the content is all the same, and there is an extreme lack of professional talent.

Whether you are an individual operating social media or a business, good content is always the most important.

Compared with personal self-media, corporate self-media has too many shackles on its feet (KPI), and it often walks very heavily. However, if all the shackles are thrown away, then there is no point in operating corporate social media.

Corporate social media serves the purpose of corporate marketing and is an important tool for corporate marketing.

However, the vast majority of corporate official WeChat accounts ultimately become tools for internal self-entertainment, leaving fans indifferent and operators with no sense of accomplishment.

Why does this happen? The positioning was wrong from the beginning.

Social media has two main uses:

• One is to act as a brand public relations platform and create user reputation, especially for some B2B companies.
• The second is for corporate marketing purposes, such as new product recommendations, event preheating, etc.

Due to the lack of professional talent, many companies equate brand social media with a place to post free hard advertisements.

It is difficult to quantify the direct conversion amount of social media. The success of new media operations is generally measured in terms of increase in followers, interaction, and exposure.

There are many social media agencies out there that also consider these metrics instead of sales metrics. It is difficult to achieve sales targets through social media.

Improving a company’s positive image, similar to corporate public relations, requires coverage from relatively authoritative news media.

Corporate marketing requires the participation of people who understand product promotion, especially those who understand advertising creativity.

Therefore, a standard corporate new media must at least be equipped with a team of four people, including a news editor (long content), a creative copywriter (short content), a designer (cooperating with the editor to create pictures), and a brand public relations (to connect with media organizations). Only with teamwork can a corporate self-media be operated well. If a company wants to produce a video, it may also need to hire a photographer and editor.

Only in this way can the company's social media avoid being monotonous and the content be relatively complete.

If these tasks are assigned to one person, it will definitely not work. The last person will definitely not get a good result because of his limited energy and expertise. As far as I know, there are very few people in the world who can write professional press releases.

In other words, the labor cost alone for operating a corporate social media is at least RMB 400,000 per year (labor costs in second-tier cities), while the price in first-tier cities should be around RMB 400,000-600,000, for well-known domestic brands. You can refer to the Durex official WeChat content operation fee, which is 5 million.

If it is a start-up, it should focus on polishing products and improving service levels. Enterprise new media can be used as a place to collect user opinions. Don’t worry too much about the number of fans and reading volume. If you want exposure, you can advertise every month and invite a few KOCs to do publicity.

At this time, I suggest that the founder should operate the company’s new media on a part-time basis. Once everything in the company is on track, we will hire professionals to run it.

Finally, I want to say that it is impossible to run a good corporate self-media by hiring an ordinary copywriter.

Does this copywriter understand news communication? Do you understand user needs? Do you understand advertising? Do you know how to make videos? I don’t know anything, and I still have the nerve to run a self-media platform.

As mentioned at the beginning: the current brand social media has boring (vague) personalities, monotonous content, lack of originality, and poor interest and practicality.

Therefore, it is crucial to hire professionals. Only professional talents can produce and disseminate professional content.

Secondly, brand social media is not just for achieving marketing purposes, positive brand exposure is also very important. Large companies in particular should pay more attention to positive brand exposure and actively build good relationships with authoritative media. Otherwise, if a crisis occurs, it would be a terrible thing for the brand to lack positive support.

For small brands, you can increase the length of marketing promotions appropriately, but the content should still be user-centric. Don’t force hard advertising, otherwise users will unfollow you. After all, the main purpose of hard advertising is to attract new customers. The most important purpose of social media is to communicate with fans, and the communication method should be as soft as possible.

At present, it is strongly recommended for small brands to "de-brand" and go for pure content accounts when engaging in social media. Because small brands have a small brand voice, it is better to focus on polishing content that users like, and then do brand promotion after the content has improved. There are already many commercial success cases, such as the knowledge IP accounts packaged by various teams on Douyin. Users like to watch this kind of content, and thus there are more commercial monetization possibilities.

Finally, let’s talk about whether brands should engage in social media:

• If companies want to gain sales online, they must engage in social media
• If companies want to get closer to consumers, they must engage in social media
• If companies want to get real feedback from users, they must engage in social media
• If a company wants to become an evergreen, it must manage social media well

Summary: Social media is a marketing tool for companies, but it is never the first priority. Apple does not operate Twitter and directly closes comments under YouTube, but the media are always rushing to report any big news.

They have no shortage of brand exposure because they have already taken the number one position in the industry: their products and services are the best in the industry.

When you are number one in your industry, brand communication becomes an easy thing.

Author: Brand Social Communication

Source: Brand social communication