It’s time for social to grow up

Beth (00:00)
if we stopped posting tomorrow, literally no one would care for 99 % of brands. And I think that’s the harsh.

truth that we need to realize. So what can we do so that we can increase our chances of not just people caring, but also doing something for the business.

Dave Heywood (00:28)
You can also subscribe to extended cuts where my guests go deeper into how they actually think, make decisions and handle the messy bits. But for now, enjoy the conversation.

Dave Heywood (00:37)
This is Marketing Careers Uncovered, and I’m Dave Heywood. Social isn’t the new kid on the block anymore. For a lot of businesses, it’s a central part of how they show up, how they’re judged, and how people really experience them day to day.

We’re gonna be talking about what it really looks like when social

grows up and whether the way we run it has grown up with it. Beth Thomas is the co-founder of Slice where she works with brands trying to bring clarity and intent back into social. But before that, she’s worked inside fast moving consumer brands and at platform level. So really seeing firsthand how social scales and also where it starts to lose its way.

So without stealing too much of your thunder, Beth, welcome. And why don’t you start with telling us a little bit more about yourself and also how you describe the problem that most teams are still wrestling with when it comes to social.

Beth (01:30)
Yes. Hi, thank you for having me on. I am Beth Thomas. I’ve worked in social and influencer marketing for over a decade, worked platform side, as you said, at TikTok, brand side, at a few different brands from small startups, scale-ups, tech, in beauty, in food, in all sorts of things, really. And also I’m a content creator. So I feel like I’ve really seen it from…

the three different sides kind of that there are to see it. Everything is so busy a million miles an hour I never had time to step back and really think.

What is this all actually for? What am I trying to do? And I think that probably is one of the main problems with social is that lots of us started as probably the youngest person in the team back 10 plus years ago.

and because lots of the wider business never understood social, they kind of left us to do whatever we wanted to do. And I think because of that, we haven’t learned lots of the fundamentals of marketing and what that is. And that’s something that we at Slice trying to really help brands achieve is bringing social back into brand and

looking at that brand strategy, what’s the business actually trying to achieve and how can social play its part in that? And the more conversations that I have now, the more this is sticking out like a kind of sore thumb of social teams, creating content and turning content out. But if you ask them, what actually are you doing that for? What is our goal here? They can’t really answer.

what are we actually trying to do? Who are we trying to reach? Not, you know, the tactics that we’re using to do it. And depending on what that is will depend on what you measure. So there’s no one size.

fits all

if you’re trying to change

perceptions of something on social. And I think this is the best example is Michael that I work with, who was head of social at Ryanair and what him and his brilliant team did there was realizing that, you know, they could make loads of pieces of content about palm trees and planes and whatever it was that everyone in the travel space was doing. Was that going to do anything for Ryanair? Probably not. And what he quite quickly realized was actually that

It was the perception of Ryanair and a really specific age group of like millennials that they wanted to change. And they thought, let, if we can use social for one thing, let’s try and do that. And everything that, you know, all the tactics was like the taking the piss out of people for booking, you know, seat 11A or whatever it was with the no window and all of this stuff that people know about that was all laddering back to trying to change perceptions of the brand. And.

The measurements that they used was getting a question in the brand survey. Lots of big brands have brand surveys that they pay a lot of money for. Often social doesn’t get a look into those. So that is something that they did to ask. I can’t remember whether it was like, do you hate Ryanair less because of social or do you like Ryanair more because of the social content? And they wanted to increase the number from whatever it started at to

higher on that scale and over that 18 month period they did that so that is Proving that actually we can use social and have an actual business impact So it totally depends what you are trying to do and first of all people need to take a step back from the constant posting cycle that we Everyone seems to be in and think about what are we actually doing on social if we can’t answer that question?

everyone just needs to have a sit down and take some time to really think about what that is and work on that. Because otherwise everyone just falls into this trap. And so many of my friends work in social and I have also fallen into that trap of just posting without thinking

if we stopped posting tomorrow, literally no one would care for 99 % of brands. And I think that’s the harsh.

truth that we need to realize. So what can we do so that we can increase our chances of not just people caring, but also doing something for the business.

So the main thing that we do at Slice is working on strategies with teams. the main thing I think that I’ve, in brands that I’ve worked at before, I haven’t seen done.

is so we take a framework from brand strategy that the four C’s, but we tweak that and do that for social. But I think the main part is this discovery phase, which where we speak to so many people in the business because they know the business way more than us. And also, even if you’re in the social team, you often don’t have a chance to properly sit down and ask these sorts of questions to the CRM team or SEO or depending on how big the company or

how different people on different levels are involved in social or want to be.

That to me is if I went brand side, I would make sure that was what I was doing. I also think it would be so interesting if I, anyone who’s changing jobs, you know, people always talk about, you know, you don’t go straight in, you take some time and you chat to people in the business, but often you go in and they’re like, especially if you work in social, right? The posts stop tomorrow. So what’s going out? And you’re there as like head of social being like.

I don’t even know what this business is yet. I haven’t worked anything out. So really having the, I guess it’s like confidence to push back when conversations like that come and say, I need to spend some time working out what we’re doing and having conversations with people in the business so that, you know, I can put a plan together because so often it just falls into instantly just falling back into that loop of creating the same content and often

You know, I say to friends and, and some, when we go in to other businesses, like really what, what is the worst that’s going to happen if you don’t post for two weeks? Like is anything going to happen? Would anybody care?

everyone could probably make the most of taking some time and not posting and not spending that time on the churn to think about this much larger picture. Because if you don’t take that time, then it’s so much harder to do it when you’re in it.

Dave Heywood (08:01)
It sounds like one of the really helpful things that someone could do is just mentally right now, ask yourself, who have you spoken to outside of your immediate team or department in the last couple of weeks?

Beth (08:14)
I think especially if you’re sort of a head of social or a social lead and you’re still in the day to day of everything that’s going on, that’s not how social is going to grow for that business. think, you know, people talk about when you’re like a founder or something working.

on the business rather than in the business. I think often because heads of social have come up through the ranks, there’s not many people who’ve, I don’t know anyone actually who’s a head of social that hasn’t been a social exec, a social manager and being that doer. So I think that switch, guess for all, no matter what your role is, like doing that switch is often quite difficult to be like, okay, hands are a bit more off now and I need to think differently.

So putting time into having conversations with other people who are at the same level as you and getting learnings from them as well. social media is still like a new job in relation to, you know, all the other jobs in businesses have sort of been around for a long time, I guess, apart from AI and things that are newer than social, but we still are.

those newer kids on the block trying to figure it out. So not being afraid, I think of having conversations with people that you trust to say, I actually not really sure if I’m getting anywhere here. Because I think a lot of times everybody’s pride gets in the way, which I understand because everyone, everyone I know is trying to get promotion and a pay rise. So you don’t want to be saying, I don’t really know what I’m doing. So finding that, finding your people where you can have those conversations.

Dave Heywood (09:49)
Yeah, but it’s moving things on from, guess, I’m not quite sure what I’m doing, but I’m not quite sure why I’m doing this. Why am I doing it? where does this sit? What function does it serve? And social’s a bit of a weird one anyway in the channel mix, because it, it genuinely, to me anyway, does feel new every couple of years.

Beth (09:56)
Hmm.

Dave Heywood (10:10)
There’s never been any role that has been so intensely tied to a platform and the whims of four or five men across Silicon Valley. It does feel like you have to really learn and relearn, but ground yourself in some of that broader context and you can probably save yourself quite a bit of stress and worrying along the way.

So how do you go about resetting a social programme that has those hallmarks of busy but a bit pointless?

Beth (10:43)
Yeah, think it’s looking at if you actually have a strategy or do you just have content pillars. I think if you social can solve or be part of solutions to business problems, whether that’s finding new audiences. So one of the brands we were working with last year, they spent huge budgets and were spending loads of money on TV ads, radio ads and those sorts of things.

they were also doing that their data team was telling us that for people who are, I guess, my age, millennials and older, they had like a tagline that when we were young, we knew. So we still remember it, but people who are sort of under 30, if you talk to them about this brand, they’ve never heard of it. Whereas to us, it was like a household name and something that we still say as like slang for, for something. sorry.

I don’t know if I can say who they are. Anyway, I don’t think it matters who they are. But so one of their main issues, which was so clear to us was that they had this huge market that didn’t have a clue who they were and that they weren’t reaching in any other of their marketing channels. So to us, it was like, well, that is the perfect place for social to come in is you’re looking a problem is you’re not reaching this audience and social can

definitely be the solution to that because people of that age are so highly indexed on social and on different channels. the problem that we were looking to solve was, one of the problems was that, and that social could definitely do that. So that was the basis of working out what then we were going to do on social and how we could actually reach those people.

And that’s when I’ve talked about a little bit today. We also realized through our insights and the research we were doing that a huge amount of Gen Z’s, people under 30 in my mind, using social search instead of Google and even over AI. I’m sure that’s going to continue to change and fluctuate. So it was like, okay, so not only can we reach this new market, we also know that they’re searching for things.

related to what we’re doing and we’re never showing up in it because we’re just making. Like we’re doing content over here that’s got nothing to do with this. So putting all those things together was, you know, these are the ways we can solve this problem. And this is how we can use social to show up in search. And then the KPIs follow from that as well of, okay, what does success look like for us? So, you know, those basics that we talked about of, know, the watch through rates or the impressions, and then looking at.

the audience that we’re reaching. And then also looking at, okay, where are they coming from? Is our search plan working? So lots of things that sort of all flow together there. the things I would look at in general are, yeah, who are we? Who are our competitors? What are they doing? Because I think so much of what we see again is if you go on social and look at nearly any brand account.

everyone is building the category rather than building their brand. And that is something that we’re sort of banging the drum about and trying to get people to realize because I don’t really know how it’s happened. I feel like brands were more different and now they all are doing and saying the same thing. They’re all sounding the same. They’re all in the same comment sections. They’re all making the same comment. They’re all…

Dave Heywood (14:12)
Yeah,

they’re all fuel seem to be on trend, don’t they?

Beth (14:14)
Exactly. But now being on trend is the biggest risk, I think, because you look and sound like everyone else. And if we are all, think, pretty immersed in this world. So if you ask someone who didn’t work in marketing or in social, you know, to name a brand that did this trend or was in this comment section that, you know, everybody on LinkedIn thinks is great. I’d imagine that most people wouldn’t be able to do that because there’s, there’s nothing distinct about

brands anymore. Everybody is very much blurring into the wallpaper.

Dave Heywood (14:50)
Yeah, yeah, and from my experience, a lot of what brand needs is to be clearly distinctive, but also bloody consistent as well. So we cannot be swapping and chopping and changing to suit whatever tastes there are out there every 12 to 24 months, because it just fries the brain, really, and you can’t recall any of it.

Beth (14:59)
Yeah.

Yes. And I think that is, that is work that we’re seeing more people talking about too. So I don’t know if you know system one, the sort of research platform, they’re looking at social a little bit more and highlighting things there. And they’re talking about distinct assets and recall and consistency and using the same fundamentals that you have in mind of just marketing forever is like doing something, having one message, delivering it well.

over a huge amount of time so that people actually can recall it. But for some reason on social, we don’t think about like the social world often doesn’t think about that. So I think, you know, one way of doing that is, you know, the mascots and we saw that we saw everyone have a mascot. But the brands that did it well, who already had something in their brand universe that they took.

and they then delivered on social was a distinct asset that made them stand out the same as, you the lines. You know, people always talk about like, Oh, but spec savers are so good at, you know, having their should have gone to spec savers. That’s because that has been drilled into everyone through so many touch points over a huge amount of years. Whereas on social, if you’re just, you know, you’re talking about this one week, then you’re doing a trend, then you’re talking about Taylor Swift.

Now you’re trying to sell a product. Like it needs to all have this thing at the top, this strategy. just call the thing. that’s what Chris and my team once said to me when, when he started, I was like, how would you describe the strategy? And he was like, he’s like, well, there’s loads of definitions, but I just call it like the thingy that’s up here that everything ladders back to. And I was like, I actually liked that because there, I don’t need to, you know,

I think sometimes we can use all these marketing words and you just lose people. But to me, it’s like visually it’s the thingy up here and everything you do is trying to do that. And a way to know if you have a strategy, personally think is if you can push back on the business, if they tell you we need to talk about X, Y, and Z or we’ve got this asset from this shoot, we needed to go on social. If you have a strategy, you usually can push back if it doesn’t work for it.

Dave Heywood (17:32)
I wanna pull on the thread of measuring what matters then. We talked a little bit about that already, but it really, for me, is central to that.

pointers, everyone talks about social and everyone must feel it’s important in some shape or form otherwise we won’t be asking for 50 million posts a week to cover it x y and z but we’re really talking about proving value here and what good measurements actually actually looks like. So you’ve covered some of those metrics already but what I’m really interested to further explore is

How do start to measure and get a sense of things which don’t have an obvious number? let’s think about things like brand perception and recall. If you’re targeting a particular audience subset or whatever, how do you start to get a sense of that and tie that back to social to make the point that this thing has a real tangible impact of a business?

Beth (18:26)
Yeah, something, this was something that was actually so helpful when Chris joined the team, he’d worked at, he has worked at agencies for like 10 years. So I guess has sort of learned so much there, which is different to, I think, when you work brand side. So I feel like the three of us together have all like got all of these different insights and learnings, but he was talking to one of our clients saying, you know, it costs a lot of money for you to run a brand survey with a big…

house, which I actually have never done one. So I don’t know the names of the big ones, but he said, but what you can do is just run it yourself in meta as you would a paid ad and targeting, you know, the audience that seen it, the audience that haven’t and, and having your questions there,

You literally can test all of these things. Again, you need some budget, but it’s going to be nothing like using one of those tools whose sole purpose is to run these huge brand surveys. So, you know, I think, as we said, you’ve got to do some things yourself with the small amount that you have to prove something. And then the conversation turns much bigger into, okay, if you as a business then do run these expensive brand surveys, which

most of the big brands do, then now that you’ve sort of taken this data and proved this and you then want more buy-in from the business, you know, then you have that conversation of, we take a question in the next month’s brand survey? So I think there are ways to literally prove our theories one way or another on social.

Dave Heywood (20:00)
if you could get every marketing or business leader to change just one thing about how they treat social, what would that be? Here’s your opportunity, fire the shot.

Beth (20:13)
it’s a two way thing, isn’t it? And I know this is probably a quick thing, but my first proper conversation I had with Michael, who’s now my business partner, was that I was complaining that social teams didn’t have the respect in businesses. And I was working all the time. I was burnt out. was a yes person. I was saying yes to everything. And I didn’t understand why I wasn’t feeling more respected and social wasn’t being more respected.

And he said to me, Beth, to be respected, you need to earn respect. And I was so annoyed with him because I was like, what do mean? I’m like breaking my back out here for this. And now that the dust has settled, I’ve realized that I think he was very right in that everything we’ve said today, it’s such a two way street. We want to be respected by the C-suite, but we need to be able to talk.

the language and prove what we’re doing more so than, you know, we’ve, went viral last month, like great, but what did that do actually has that, is that something to celebrate anymore? If it, if it is because you went viral within your target market and that was, you know, all these, all these other things that we’ve talked about today. Great. But I think that we both from top down and bottom up have a job to do to like meet in the middle that these people don’t.

necessarily understand social because when they were going up in their career, it wasn’t a thing. Maybe it didn’t even exist in some of the brands that we talk to. Whereas now we need to educate those people and then once we show and just, I’m not saying we need to bloody change a business, but once we start as a social teams having these little indications of these little changes and…

you know, these 1 % that have turned into something that are laddering back to the thingy, that then, that then we are given more respect and getting seats at those tables that we need to be at. But we can’t just expect, well, you know, it’d be great to expect to be there, but I think that’s not real life. So if we want to be there, and I think everyone in social has a job to do, that we all need to, to talk their language,

Dave Heywood (22:22)
I think that’s a really good place to finish up. We know that social is still and will continue to be one of the most visible ways in which we connect with customers through our brands. And yeah, really deserve some of that grown up thinking that we’ve talked about. And yeah, what’s come through for me.

really attention on it’s own the job, having that clarity and clear intent and a strategy you can point to to go, this is why, this is why we’re doing this and this is the benefit in commercial terms to what we’re doing. So thank you so much for helping guide us through this conversation and just be really honest about what good looks like and some of the frustrations when…

when social grows up. So, thank you ever so much for joining us today and thanks to you for listening. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, don’t forget to subscribe for future episodes, leave a review or share with your friends and colleagues and we’ll see you next time.

Dave Heywood (23:26)
You can also subscribe to extended cuts of these conversations where my guests go deeper into how they actually think, make decisions and handle the messy bits.