Michael Corcoran on why many brands still misunderstand how social media works

Betfair and its product The Exchange is quite different in sports betting: you bet against other betters. We were doing some great tactical work to activate sponsorships and help people to better understand the brand through education. But the legacy for me was building the podcast network from scratch. The budgets were there to buy reach, but I felt it was obvious, generic and we missed an edge or way for the brand to grow like Paddy Power [its sister brand at the time]. While what I thought I built was strategic, it wasn’t.

I think that really transformed the way I thought about social media marketing going forward. I realized that I needed to do better as a professional. I didn’t know what strategy was – like really was. I started to study brand strategy a little more and connect how this can give focus, shape and direction to social.

A merger sent me out of Betfair and into the wild again. I worked on Uefa Euro 2020, then this role came up for ‘Europe’s friendliest airline.’ Ryanair was looking for a head of social, and in the job spec, it explained that you would have a carte blanche opportunity to really take the brand and flip it on its head when it came to the use of social media. I was already obsessed with Ryanair and, in particular, Michael O’Leary for their approach to business and marketing. It was straight talking and no bullshit. I felt that I might be able to effect change. I did a 30-minute interview, and I got offered the job the next day.

They needed somebody who could develop their social media, but also steer the ship and grow a team. I think I was so straight talking in the interview, being fed up with the existing landscape, that I probably sounded like one of them already. I wasn’t going to pander – I was very clear: this is what I’m trying to do; this is what I’m trying to change; this is how I think I can do it. And I’m privileged to say it’s that work that has me speaking to you today.

You now head up social consultancy Slice. What advice are you giving to brands?

What I developed at Ryanair was a smart but simple method: develop a strategy, build an operation and team that reflect how that strategy would come to life and then develop sustainable processes to continue the work.

To this day, there’s an absence of strategy in social media. Everyone recognizes the opportunity of social media but decision makers weren’t convinced to invest more and have better focus and clarity as to why they are using it. Followed by how to scale and build the right operation.

The reliance on agencies creates challenges to making it sustainable. We know that in-house capabilities are high on brand agendas and some of the best talent are leaving agencies to go freelance to make a better living and work directly with brands. Add into the mix that marketing agencies come with too much bias as their business models rely on production and management fees, meaning what they recommend as ‘strategy’ is really just tactics and what is done as execution is prescribed based on their business model. That’s not the value brands need now, and I think the current agency model is no longer effective. To paraphrase Caroline Johnson from The Business Model: the billable hour is dead.

We develop strategy, build the operations, processes and the tools needed to make in-house teams sustainable or the right mix of third parties. Once we feel that they’re confident enough and sustainable enough to do it themselves, we hand over the keys, leave and we move on to our next rodeo. Our aim is to make ourselves redundant. If we can do that we know that we’ve left a legacy behind that has value.

What are the biggest misconceptions marketing teams have about social media?

Many people still think that social media content or messaging has a short shelf life. For years, people believed that the model of making content was: it has to be new; it has to be fresh; it has to be different every day, every month, every year that you post.

That’s not necessarily the case. A marketing director wouldn’t make a TV ad for £250,000 and then only show it once on ITV1 at 2pm on a Tuesday. Most marketers know we need to repeat a piece of creative in order to land a message. This needs to be done across multiple channels and in multiple ways to increase the likelihood that the message will be consumed and trigger recall in the viewer.

My theory is that this ‘need for endless new content’ on social media was created by agencies who make money by making content and managing the platforms. The more content they make, the more money they make. They are not going to say: you need to invest less in your production and more in paid media or creators.

At Ryanair, we built what I call ‘the banger bank’. It’s not rocket science: we reposted the same piece of content at intervals throughout the year several times. To do this, we built a bank of video content, because the platforms required video in order to increase their reach. We didn’t have enough time or resource to create new content at that volume every week on a consistent basis.

We made a decision to stop doing certain work in order to focus on this and build a bank. Over a 25-week period, we created 250 pieces of content. We republished each video between 12 and 16 weeks later. This gave us the opportunity to communicate the same message again.

This had two benefits: there’s only a small percentage of people who saw that first piece of content when it was shown originally. The 60,000 people who saw the first video are not going to be the same 60,000 who see the second. There may be a few who catch it twice, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Remember how marketing works.

Once we had enough in our bank to recycle the content that we had published, it allowed us to start reducing the amount of video content that we made. So we went from 10 to eight to six to four a week. But we weren’t just reducing the content based on the volume. We then also started to focus more on the changes, iterations, improvements, and the quality of execution we could make to the content. So the quality of the content got better and better.

Instead of posting once and getting 100,000 views, we were getting between 1.5m to 2m views on the videos over time. Furthermore, the consistent delivery of the content in a certain way every time meant that there was a compound effect increasing our reach, as we started to build the consistency.

The second time we published, we would typically get more views. That didn’t happen for every video, because often there’s too many other things happening on social media that day that may prevent the content reaching its potential. That’s a really important learning too. A piece of content that doesn’t perform well once shouldn’t be put on the scrap heap. You should give that content another chance, because there’s too many factors that can decide whether your video will seen by people in the right way and perform well.

Next we need to address follower count. For the first 10 years of social media, high follower numbers suggested that you were doing something good, and that’s not necessarily wrong. There’s been a change since TikTok launched. The feeds are built with ‘discovery’. On a daily basis, the platforms are playing to the needs and wants and motivations behind what people are watching on social and discovery feeds that. Somebody with 500 followers can become famous on the internet and get millions more views than somebody with 5 million followers.

The takeaway here is that follower count doesn’t make people famous. Instead, being discovered on social media is what’s making people or brands become more well-known. Increase in follower numbers is a good byproduct of your success, especially if you’re seeing incremental growth over time. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to be well known or your content is going to perform, and there are plenty of brands and accounts and creators out there with 10,000 followers, and they’re getting millions of views all the time on their content.

Now to build on this, the platforms have evolved again. There are two types of ‘discovery’ content. There is prompted and unprompted discovery in organic content. Unprompted is what we’ve just spoken about. It is what you see in your newsfeed/or ‘for you page’. The discovery algorithm knows you are watching certain types of content. It is trying to learn and read your behavior to give you what it thinks you like.

Now the platforms are going to occasionally throw other stuff at you as well, but for the majority of your content, it’s things that the platform thinks you will want to see. This is where I think there’s the greatest opportunity for organic social to actually provide more value. We’re all familiar with organic search in the world of Google and other search platforms, and how we’ve built marketing teams to play to the world of being ranked on indexed on Google search through link building, organic content, keywords and optimization. All of that is now happening on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and more. But this social media search bar is becoming such an important factor for young people as they look for information on the internet.

Social media platforms are building the infrastructure to use social search better and also the back-end, like Creator Search Insights, is telling brands what people are looking for and what content gaps exist. The search bar on TikTok gives you a category list of videos and information on things you’re physically prompting and searching for. It’s giving you Wikipedia definitions for certain brands and certain people and certain IPs. It gives you a new lever in the role organic social media can play for brands and businesses.

I speak a lot about how you can also ‘be on social media’ without being on social media. There are so many uses for social media: delivering organic content now in more ways than ever, working with creators, paid media, customer service. But the problem is that within brands, there are so many under-invested small teams working on multiple social media platforms. They are trying to do it all, and they are so stretched that they end up not doing anything that is impactful.

So to wrap up, myth-buster number two: follower count is not a signal of success. It is a byproduct of success; pay attention to the social media search bar – and don’t stretch your teams too thin by getting them to do everything through social media. Start with strategy, focus on some things that go big, drive impact, prove to the business that social works and then ask for more investment.

In an age of social media disinformation, what can brands do to help maintain trust?

There’s not a lot they can do because they don’t control the platforms. Social media is so fragmented now that you cannot control what people say or what people do, especially when it comes to truth or misinformation. The only people that can address that are the platforms themselves.

I also think that brands have to be comfortable that they’re not going to be able to control what everybody says about their brand. That makes working in this space hard, and it gets in the way of brands being braver on the platforms too, because they’re afraid that ‘a Karen’ complains about the smallest thing. The brand then (often incorrectly) thinks that negative comments are damaging their brand on the internet far greater than the reality. In most cases, the majority of passive users who see your content are probably OK with it, but don’t physically engage.

What myth about marketing would you most like to bust?

That you can’t build brands on social. There is this misconception over the true value that the platforms provide. Social media presents an opportunity where many people are spending huge amounts of their time. Everyone knows this, from the C-suite right down to the day-to-day marketing teams operating on the channels.

Now, if somebody applies the timeless truths of marketing to the world of social media, I believe they can build brands on social media. Strategy and getting creative with repetition. Get those reps in.

What advice would you give your younger self if you could go back in time?

Back then it would have been: dyslexia will be your greatest strength and it will propel your career forward on top of being curious. Don’t hide your dyslexia. Stop being such a pig-headed gobshite and just tell people what the problem is. If I had given myself that advice, maybe I would have got to where I am today even faster.

If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is…

Marketing is about evoking emotion, creating tension, making people feel some and you’ll be memorable. If you don’t provoke, elect or trigger some sort of emotional response, you’re not going to be memorable. And if brands don’t create tension when it comes to the creative, they are going to fall flat. To build a brand, you need to get off the fence.

You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.

Tim Healey listens, learns, and synthesizes real-world best practices from hundreds of marketing professionals and serves them up in his weekly interviews for The Drum.Tim’s Little Grey Cells Club is a trusted, no-sales, peer-driven network where senior-level marketing directors unite to exchange authentic insights, confront challenges, and drive leadership forward.