Choosing channels for social

Hi. I'm Julie Atherton and I'm the founder of the social media advisory and marketing consultancy Small Wonder. I also write books on social media and social media strategy. I'm here today to talk about choosing channels for social.

When we're thinking about choosing our channels for social media, we really need to make sure we're picking the right channels for our audience and the channels that are really going to help us meet the objectives we set for our social media marketing. To do that, we really need to understand how the channels work and think about what the criteria are that are going to help us choose the right ones. So, I'm going to talk today about social-interest graph. I'm going to talk about channel comparisons and what the key factors are between certain channels that I've selected. Then, what are the channel choice criteria that can help us make right decisions?

What is the social interest graph? If we think back to when we first started using social media channels and there weren't that many around. Facebook was one of the earliest ones. Facebook was really built around a social graph. People connected to people that they know, they might have been related to them, or they worked with them, or they met them somewhere, or they're in their neighborhood and that social graph really underpinned the way that Facebook worked. On social media in our social profiles, we're showing who we are and what we know, and what that enabled marketers to do was to assume that the people that we were connected to in this network could give us an implication of the way that people might buy. I might behave in a similar way to the people that looked like me and were connected to me through that social graph. That's why on Facebook things like Facebook marketplace works really well and why we kinda trust Facebook reviews because we feel we've got a connection to those people that we know through that channel. Over time, social media channels have developed and we've had lots of new channels arrive. In particular, we've had channels that are more interest-based. Probably the most interest-based channel is TikTok. On TikTok, we're connected to people that we know in some ways, but the majority of the people that we're connected to and the brands that we follow are there because we're interested in the topics that they're talking about. We're following hashtags. We're following influences. We're using the channel as a search engine to find information that we might like. The algorithms within that search engine are looking to give us content that they think we might be interested in. Our expression on TikTok is about who we like to be and it's about what we're interested in, what we like and therefore when we're marketing on TikTok, it's really clear that explicit relationship between what we're interested in and what we're likely to buy. This social interest graph is a mix on most channels. We think about a channel like LinkedIn, a network, our professional network, it's very social graph based, but we're also being served content because of what we're interested in through the hashtags that are included on that content, or through perhaps the groups that we're part of, or the thought leaders that we follow. When we're thinking about marketing and we're thinking about choosing our channels, what's going to be most useful to us? Is it going to be that socially connected networked audience or that interest connected network audience? That will define which channels we might want to use, but also how we use those channels and the content that we put within them.