We create social experiences.

By Sam Bettis, Senior Social Media Manager

Social media is bad, right? That’s what they’re telling you – and they’re not wrong. We’ve become addicted to scrolling (300 feet of mobile content a day, says Facebook!), we make unhelpful comparisons, believe fake news, and often pursue pack-like behaviour where we run into supermarkets and hurt ourselves on purpose…

However – we still often believe that your brand should be on social. And we invite you to start thinking about things a little differently with us. Let’s look at the situation – the newsfeed is cluttered and full of bad things, and there are over 60m brand pages on Facebook alone. So many are doing the same thing – just talking and chasing vanity metrics, because it’s something to report on. Now let’s think about what makes social / the internet great: its ability to connect us to things that inspire and excite us, and make tasks easier – ultimately giving us more time for the things we enjoy. I was at the airport a few weeks back, and instead of anxiously waiting at the departures board (I hate flying!), the airport was able to send me updates on messenger about my flight – freeing me up to read and relax. That is great social.

This is where you, as brands, need to play when you position yourselves on social.

Call it semantics – but this is why we want to ditch social media thinking. The Oxford definition of media is “the main means of mass communication (broadcasting, publishing, and the Internet) regarded collectively”. We want to move away from the idea of mass communication and focus on experiences we can deliver to the user – that’s why we’re going to start talking about social experiences.

A social experience may not be a broadcast campaign – but will always be what’s best for the customer in that particular moment. It could be a chatbot, employing a specialist community management team, a film that entertains and delights, or social shopping. Social no longer belongs exclusively to the marketing department – it belongs to the customer, and should be fed into by all departments – HR, Marketing, Operations, the lot! Great social experiences are key to unlocking long term growth – Google have said people who engage with brands on social spend twice as much as those who don’t.

And when it comes to correcting bad social, social experiences play into a longer-term trend around more purposeful, healthy social usage. Users will be heading to social with an intention (rather than mindless scrolling). Purposeful social users will join groups for things they have an interest in, use social search with intention, or go to messenger for 1-1 communication.

At krow we’ve been developing social experiences to delight our Clients’ customers using techniques such as chatbots, live and great content – and forever learning about what makes the customer tick. If you’d like to find out more – get in touch.