You Ask, I Answer: Is Organic Social Media a Marketing Channel?

In today's episode, Teresa asks, what is your actual stance on whether or not social media, organic social media, is a marketing channel or not? This is a follow-on to the Agora Pulse great debate about uh organic social media and whether it is a marketing channel or not. In that debate, I was uh assigned the position of against that uh organic social media is not a marketing channel. This happens to coincide with what I actually believe, that it's not a marketing channel, and here's why. Organic social media is an umbrella term for a bunch of very, very disparate products and services, right?

You of course have the obvious things like Facebook, for example, or Instagram, but you also have stuff like Slack or Discord or TikTok or YouTube. Uh take your pick of the gazillion and a half different apps that all fall under the social media umbrella. Here's an easy uh way to to look at the products, like go into a product like Agora Pulse, and you'll see in there all the different social networks it connects to. So why can't we call this a marketing channel? Because there's no way to do apples to apples on anything in there, right?

If you go in and you look, right, Slack, Discord, like yeah, these are are powerful tools for social media communities for managing uh social media communities that they work great. Facebook groups, similar, LinkedIn groups, etc. How do you do an apples to apples comparison with that and say TikTok, right? How do you even do an apples to apples comparison with, say, Facebook and and YouTube, right? Facebook says a video view is three seconds.

YouTube says a video view is thirty seconds, so you can't even compare apples to apples in the same kind of format. When you look at a marketing channel, the purpose of a marketing channel is to deliver information and possibly enable the sale of goods to consumers within that channel, right? How do you how you deliver products and services and goods to someone in a Discord server versus on your TikTok uh profile? Totally different. Can't even use even the same copy.

You have to transform it into different media formats. Compound that with the fact that organic social media really is kind of a horizontal, right? If you're good at it, you can use it at every stage of the customer journey. You can use it for awareness, you can use it for consideration. You can use it for purchase enablement, right?

You can buy stuff right off of Instagram. You can use it for customer service and reputation management, evangelism, and things like that. There have been any number of companies that have bought software that does employee advocacy on social media programs. A marketing channel's purpose and designed intent is for marketing, right? It's not for sales, right?

You can't use display ads for customer service. Just not a thing. And yet, when we talk about whether or not social media is a marketing channel, and when we treat it like an aggregated marketing channel, we're kind of lumping all that stuff in together. And that's not what a marketing channel is. It's important to distinguish that we're saying, I'm saying, that's organic social media is not a marketing channel.

That is not the same as saying it's ineffective, right? I I think during the debate, people got kind of confused that saying it was bad or that it was ineffective. And yeah, if you're bad at it, it's ineffective, but if you're bad at anything, it's ineffective. But the question was the debate was is it a marketing channel? Um, not whether it's good or not, not whether it's effective or not.

It is effective in the in the the right hands. So social media is very effective. It's just not a marketing channel. And again, it for me, it comes down to can you do apples to apples comparisons of the strategies, tactics, execution, and measurement of disparate social channels. The answer is no, you can't.

You can do subsets, right? Uh realistically, every individual service in social media is a marketing channel, right? Instagram is a marketing channel. You can do an apples to apples comparison of an influencer program on Instagram with your your company's Instagram brand profile. That is a sensible way to do apples to apples, which is getting better engagement.

It's the same kind of engagement, uh same definitions for what constitutes a view, etc. But when you're trying to do cross-channel measurement in social media, it's really difficult. How do you measure the impact of Instagram? And how is it different from how you measure the impact of Slack or Telegram, right? Or WeChat or WhatsApp.

They're all social media, but they're not all the same. And the measurement among them is not apples to apples. So from that debate, no organic social media is not a channel. And critically, if you are treating it as a channel and lumping all the data together and measuring all together together, you're probably unfairly boosting underperforming channels and unfairly panelizing your overperforming channels within social media. So don't lump it all together, be very granular with it, and you'll you'll get more success out of your social media efforts because you'll focus on what's working for you within the umbrella term of social media.

Good question. Uh as you heard, we had quite a debate about it, and I hope that uh you give it some thought and how you uh measure it and manage your social media. Thanks for watching. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button