Kim Townend

Social Media Listening & Strategy

social strategy

Ten Principles for Regenerative Social Marketing

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During the time I’ve spent working specifically in social, I’ve often come across a type of person (both agency and client-side) who is looking for a quick-fix, maybe doesn’t really see the worth in organic, figure ads could do the job, and doesn’t put much stock in brand or strategy beyond look and feel.


This approach might get you where you need to be during the first 12 months, but it’s not sustainable, doesn’t allow space to grow, and you burn through your potential audience quickly.


The type of social marketing that I encourage my clients to practise is much more sustainable and generative. It allows time and space to investigate and understand your brand, your audience and the right social space for you. It helps you grow, but not at the expense of longevity and turning your audience into a community. It’s respectful of people’s time and attention and never just publishes identical copy and content across every channel.


To clarify what I mean when I talk about generative marketing on social, I’ve created a list of 10 simple principles I adhere to.

  1. Authenticity above all else.
  2. Identify your specific audience (s)
  3. Cultivate community
  4. Work with the algorithms, but don’t be at their mercy
  5. Great content lives in the space between your audience interests and your brand values
  6. Don’t be too concerned with what your competitors are doing
  7. Great social is more than great creative
  8. Sales doesn’t have to be gross if you don’t make it feel gross
  9. ‘Always on’ doesn’t have to equal burnout.
  10. Behave like a good human

I use social intelligence to get to grips with your audience and interests and the spaces they play in, and I take the time to work with my clients to nail who their brand is and what that means for how they behave on social.

If you take the time to get your social strategy right, it will serve you for years to come. The execution/tactics will undoubtedly need updating as the platforms change their algorithms and favourite content types on a whim. But the core strategy should remain sound.

In a world of content overload and social same-ification, fostering and building connections is the best way to succeed. Please get in touch if you like the idea of working together to make that happen!

How I’m using ChatGPT to improve my audience insights and social strategies

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You’re probably a bit bored of ChatGPT posts already, I don’t blame you. I am too. Right now there’s lots of conversation about massive future scenarios, and much less about how we can use the tool as is to make our jobs easier and our research better.

This chart shows Twitter mentions of ChatGPT since it appeared at the end of last year.
7 million+, is a lot of Twitter mentions. Data from Pulsar: Trends.

I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT for a little while, and these are some of my initial thoughts on how I’m using it, and the gaps it can plug in my social listening/audience intelligence projects.

So far, I’ve found that ChatGPT provides me with some excellent starting points to make my own research and analysis better. I use it as a first step before setting up searches in other tools where I can access the data set and understand the whys and the hows.

I’m going to share with you the top three things I’m using ChatGPT for right now, and how they have improved my process.

1. Better Desk Research

I like to work on projects that I’m already interested in, but that can’t always be the case and sometimes I need to understand some key basics about a given category to get me thinking about how I’m going to go about my work.

I was tempted to call this ‘in place of search’ but it’s not in place of search, it’s just become the first step in my process.

Instead of starting with Google, I’ll now ask ChatGPT to give me 4-5 paragraphs on things I should know about subject X. I’ve found this to be more useful than search in the very early stages, but I will usually go on to search around key areas or sub-categories that have been surfaced by my initial prompt.

2. Better Audience Segmentation

Sometimes there’s no budget to run a full social audience insights project, sometimes the communities you want to understand aren’t active on platforms that allow listening, and sometimes you want a broad idea about who the segments might be before you put together a social search to understand them better.

In these cases, it’s really useful to be able to understand some simple audience segmentation to start thinking about how you might cluster your audience groups and the types of content that might resonate with each.

Here, I asked ChatGPT to give me audiences and category needs around ‘alcohol-free’ related content.

As you can see, it delivered back a pretty comprehensive list of audiences and content types that I should be considering, however without audience sizes I would still have to run a social trends search to understand which of these clusters was worth a deeper dive.

I can also delve further into these segments to understand things like

  • What are they likely to be reading?
  • Which social networks are they likely to use?
  • Who are the key influencers in this space?

I’ve now got some good starting points to really begin my research, and I can sense check anything that feels wrong or off using a combo of social/search/third party data.

I’ve also saved myself a good amount of time that can now be spent honing my search or strategy.

3. Better Boolean Strings

The final thing I want to talk about here is how useful ChatGPT is, if you deal in social listening or audience intelligence, and spend your time putting together the most comprehensive boolean search strings that are possible.

Once I’ve got a better understanding of the audiences, topics and segments, in the same chat I might ask to have a boolean string with a specific outcome in mind generated.

This is a first attempt at a simple search string based on the topic I’d been researching. I could go on and create a more natural language-style search in ChatGPT, or I can take this great starting point and rewrite it so it includes the specificities and exclusions that only a human would consider. (You would be amazed at how much K-Pop finds its way into almost every Twitter search)

Being able to do all this desk research beforehand hopefully means that you’re not going to have to spend quite as long cleaning the data either.

Limitations

All of this is great, right? Well, mostly but there are some very obvious drawbacks that need to be considered. Firstly the timeline

ChatGPT’s most recent training data only runs until September 2021, so if you’re looking for new trends/up-to-date info about influencers or social networks then this is not the right tool for you.

It is much better with global data than anything territory specific, this varies from topic to topic, but I have found it to be somewhat limiting when it comes to understanding location-specific categories

Oh, and there’s the big one where I can’t see the data and check its accuracy. If I can’t click through to the post or use my own sarcasm filter, I’m not going to be happy presenting this to a client.

So…?

I’ve only been using ChatGPT for a short while and I’m sure that over the coming months, I’ll figure out better ways to use the tool. For now, I’m excited about the possibilities, but like any decent strategist, I’ll take any insights that I can’t access the raw data behind with a pinch of salt.

It won’t replace desk research, and it will certainly not replace humans when it comes to insights, but it’s an extremely useful productivity tool with a million use cases that probably haven’t even been dreamed up yet.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can use ChatGPT in your strategy/audience work, then I recommend Prompt from Audience Strategies – a veritable bible for this kind of work and extremely reasonably priced.

How Broad City’s social media strategy delivers, as well as being MASSIVELY FUN

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It’s probably not a big secret that I’m a huge TV nerd, and as such I love Social TV. What I’m constantly astounded by, is how little thought and effort is put into most TV show social strategies. Sure, Doctor Who and Supernatural do some stuff, but in all honestly – most of this is fuelled by fandom, not smart, creative thinking.

Enter Broad City.

Until I researched this piece, I had no idea that the creators and stars Abbi and Ilana worked in SEO/social pre web-series, but suddenly all became clear.

As the second season of Broad City launched on Comedy Central in the US, it was obvious that the girls had upped their game. Their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr presence was top notch, but not satisfied with that they decided to hit dark social as well, creating their own keyboard app, so you could now share your fave Abbi and Ilana gifs with your BFF in texts.

They partnered with Lyft and created a Broad City bus (that featured a replica of Abbi’s apartment) and drove it around picking up customers, who then Instagrammed it like crazy. (hashtags front and centre)

But the real genius was in the way the show was aware of which moments in each episode people were going to want to share. These were the ones they created gifs and stickers from and served up in their keyboard app. This was updated weekly, after each new episode with content that had just aired.

They also created in show moments that referenced online content – who can forget the al dente dentist or the glorious Body By Trey dot Biz?

Don’t get me wrong, these ladies were a content marketing machine, throughout the 10 episode run all of the owned channels posted regularly, but it didn’t ever get annoying, even if you followed them on everything. Reasons being

1) The tone of voice was always totally on point.

This isn’t a brands saying BAE type situation. Abbi and Ilana can talk like millennials, because they are millennials.

2) Catchphrases that are good hashtags.

There was no attempt to keep jokes running longer than they needed to. These girls (and their marketing team) understand that Twitter is all about the now so each episode would feature at least a couple of super hashtaggable moments, just ripe for the tweeting.

3) Their approach was integrated perfectly, but they kept their channel content separate.

Gifs and longtail content goes on Tumblr, videos are uploaded natively to Facebook, Twitter is perfect for gifs, memes and showing off fan art. Although the content occasionally crossed over, the strategy was clear and it worked. None of it felt like an marketing ploy dreamt up by a middle aged man who doesn’t get it.

Their social strategy feels less ‘put together’ than HBOs for Girls (which caters to a similar demographic), where everything feels a little bit more corporate than it should. With Broad City it all manages to feel natural and effortless. And this in turn, makes you really, really want to be their friend.

This is a perfect example of an always on social media campaign with well thought out content at its core.

It’s something we should all aim for.

Oh, and check this out for some of the best Broad City social moments.