Hello and welcome back to Messages from Mars hosted by Zozimus Agency. We’re here with episode five, bringing our expertise to your ears. My name is David Wilson, and I’ll be your host in today’s episode. We’ll be catching up with two members of our social team, Jamie Garrett and Abbie Stark to talk all things Zozimus.
What strategies and content are you finding that are working best on social for clients? What isn’t working?
Jamie: What we find works best and it’s universally relevant, is video. Short form video specifically these days, but video, it’s able to convey your brand’s code, essential self authentically. Your (brand) is using short form video to build rapport, showcase what your brand is all about and get people and faces in front of it. Constituents that really helps build brand authenticity.
Abbie: I think that’s really important, that emphasis on authenticity. I think a lot of our clients and people with social media in general, sometimes they’ll lean towards having a really formal or professional brand identity online. When looking for big results across all of the different platforms, I think it’s easy to focus on places like TikTok. That seems really intuitive that you would be going authentic and raw, but even on platforms like LinkedIn. I think people are showing more behind the scenes, telling more about their journeys, how they got places and and that’s had a real impact on their audiences.
As AI integrates into marketing campaigns and creative, where are you seeing AI’s place in social media campaigns and content?
Jamie: For me, I feel like AI is kind of like mother’s helper. It’s definitely a time saver. Now, granted, AI has grown leaps and bounds since its integration and appearance on the scene. So it’s definitely gotten better, but it’s going to keep getting better. But at this point right now, it is not foolproof and a hundred percent independent. So it still requires that human touch and direction. So whether you’re queuing up a query to get content, you need to refine it a bit, so it still requires a hands on approach, it’s definitely been impacted and it’s a positive trend for us.
Abbie: I think I speak for all of us when I say it’s really come in and change the game. It’s probably coming up on about a year of when we started really using AI in our daily lives at the agency before, you know, it could be just like an add on to some of the softwares that we were using, or like a nice to have, or maybe people talked about AI in terms of the algorithms of different social media platforms.
Where I think it’s been a huge game changer is in the content planning and then like data analysis and really pulling huge amounts of data information in and allowing us to distill that down without having to spend hours scrolling through our past posts. Also, putting in the past year’s worth of data and see and ask what are the trends here. What are potential new viral posts that we could have pretty much in every stage of our content development and process from ideation, we’re able to come up with sample content calendars, and take a look at competitor posts and pull insights from those as well.
What are some recent developments in social that are effecting tactics the most?
Jamie: It’s easy to try to jump on new things or feel the pressure to try new platforms or new updates as they come along. But again, to go back to our earlier discussion about knowing what’s right for your brand, I think you have to evaluate social media platforms. Using that criteria as well.
So if we take Threads, for some people, maybe for influencers or for e-commerce brands who maybe don’t have as much image or video content who want to get into more of a written aspect, and they know their audience isn’t on a platform like X. Maybe Threads was a good place to experiment.
We recommended not getting into that platform just because we didn’t see the value of splitting our resources, and essentially kind of preaching and putting all of this content out into an abyss of people who may or may not eventually come in and find our brand on other social channels or go to the website.
Abbie: I think you have to look at again, like, is this a net positive for my brand to be on these platforms? Is it a net negative at the end of the day and just try to use your best judgment for where your brand is going and the different platforms that can help it get there.
I think that in regard to tactics that we have used in the past that we’re currently not integrating in our strategies much these days. I think it would probably be like those really text heavy posts that really don’t drive engagement at all. It’s just sort of talking at you and not talking with you, or inviting you into the conversation per se. I think those posts, they’re just very antiquated. They’re very clunky. They’re not a good use of post space, real estate online, if you will, or time as social media managers and strategists go. It does not behoove us. So I think we’re definitely navigating away from that, and falling more into video driven posts.
What is exciting you about social media right now? Where do you see the platforms going into next year and beyond, and how can brands continue to gain engagement?
Jamie: I think and I hope for more AI implementation into all platforms for users. I think that will be a game changer. Allowing users to use it, to create their posts, which we can then in turn, pull as user generated content.
They’ve already started doing that on Instagram. They’ve got a feature on stories where you can type in a query for an AI generated sticker to adorn your post with. So I think that’s pretty neat and that’s an exciting step into the future.
Abbie: I was just on a call with a TikTok advertising rep, and we were talking about how on TikTok, you actually don’t need to get super granular in your audience build for paid campaigns. What they recommend is that you just set your geography and maybe simple demographics like your age, gender, that sort of thing. But you don’t need to go in there and use keywords or audience behaviors because the AI and the algorithm on that platform will drive your content to the people that it needs to get to. And I think that opens up a whole world of possibilities for people who maybe thought this is too challenging for me, or I’ll never be able to figure this out.
I think that also goes for other platforms. Maybe, you know, TikTok is the most advanced when it comes to algorithm, but even places like Instagram, where we’re not really using hashtags anymore, and it’s focused more on maybe using the alt text that you put for your photo or your caption.
Social media will get a lot better about predicting what people want to see, and it will be able to filter out a lot of noise, which can be scary because that means that maybe not as many people will see our content, but I think that the right people will start to see it and it will probably get a lot more specific and individualized.
Want to hear more? Watch the full episode of Messages from Mars here.
BOSTON, MARS
