Many brands mistake chasing trends for strategy. A real social strategy translates the brand's core emotional value into content that creates culture. It's about proactive brand-building, not just reactive trend-hopping, which is a common but flawed approach.
If executives or legal teams reject your social media ideas, it's a failure in your salesmanship, not their understanding. The responsibility lies with the social team to build trust through soft skills, education, and presenting ideas with clear business cases and examples.
There is no such thing as a boring brand. A marketer's core function is to find what is uniquely compelling about any product or company and build culture around it. Don't default to tying your brand to external trends; instead, create your own cultural moments.
Go beyond asking AI to just write content. Use it to refine your work. For example, feed a video script into a custom agent and ask it to identify where audience retention might drop, suggest secondary hooks, or increase tension to improve watch-through rates.
It's easy to produce generic "leadershipy" content. To build a brand people remember, you must identify and consistently communicate your unique perspectives and strong opinions. These stances are what differentiate you and create a lasting impression, turning content into a cohesive brand identity.
Don't fear AI creating "slop" content. Algorithms reward resonance, not just volume. Skilled strategists can use AI to scale their unique ideas, while mediocre AI-generated content will simply fail to perform, just as human-created "slop" did before.
As platforms prioritize discovery over followers (the interest graph), budget should shift to creating high-quality, top-of-funnel content that reaches new audiences. Dedicating extensive resources to replying to every comment is less effective, as few brands have a true "community."
Instead of hiding from negative perceptions, use them as the foundation of your strategy. A video game developer, whose previous game was broken, successfully launched their next title by showing raw, unfinished gameplay far ahead of launch to prove the new game worked and counter audience skepticism.
In today's algorithm-driven landscape, excellent content is the price of entry. When starting a social team, prioritize hiring a skilled content creator over a social media manager. You can build a strategy around great content, but a great strategy can't save mediocre content that won't get seen.