Welcome to another edition of PROse, where we explore the science behind building a brand.

In today’s email, we discuss:

• What is a lights on social media strategy

• The need to draw your audience in

• Why & how marketers fall into the lights on strategy trap

Yo! I’m Darien from Antidote 👋🏾. Every week I share what I learn about the science of building a brand. If someone forwarded this email to you or you’re reading this online, welcome to the fold! What you're about to read is an unconventional view on B2B marketing.

If you enjoy it, join 350+ other B2B marketers on the journey to build a standout brand.

“Lights on social” refers to an approach where a brand treats its accounts like a billboard. They either become a boring corporate brand or attempt to jump into every hot trend.

There are two common scenarios that cause marketers to get trapped into lights on mode:

1. They’re in an early-stage or relatively unknown company being told by senior leadership they need to be active on social media, but don’t have proper resources and talent to build a winning social media program

2. They haven’t built a sustainable content ideation system that allows them to create original, authentic content that pulls their audience in

The problem with thinking you need to be active on social

People are surprised when I tell them they shouldn’t worry about building on social media, considering I run a…social media agency. Alas, sometimes it’s the right answer.

Founders and CMOs often get duped into thinking another startup’s success on social is a function of solely arbitraging platform features (e.g. more threads, more Reels, more carousels, etc). That is seldom the case. Usually it’s the function of one or more of these things:

• High production content (“professional” video or design)

• Internal team member(s) with an established personal brand

• Investment in other brand touchpoints (e.g. events, sponsorships)

In other words, social (and all the arbitrage plays) is the fuel on the existing fire. It’s not the flame itself. When you’re building an audience on the brand accounts, those are the things that make you intriguing enough for someone to pay attention. Playing it any other way is playing the game on “hard mode”.

Why reactive strategies aren’t sustainable

There are several types of reactive social strategies: trend-jacking, “reply-jacking”, many meme strategies, and customer service are some of the most common. And, they’re not always a bad thing. In some cases they’re a necessary part of the job.

For example, Delta gets hundreds, if not thousands, of customer support requests/complaints per day. It would be pretty negligent, from a customer experience and stock-perspective, not to spend a considerable amount of resources monitoring & responding to customer requests. But it’s not the only content they’re publishing, nor should it be.

By definition, if you’re primarily publishing reactive content, you’re not creating your own narrative. You’re not truly drawing your audience in. Over time your brand becomes less memorable, or memorable for the wrong things.

There’s also the issue of time and mental health. The social media industry’s always on mentality can be a strain on mental health. Imagine watching 8 hours (or more) of nonstop local news. When you’re always looking out for the next trend to hop on or a viral post to comment under, that’s essentially what you’re doing. There’s nothing productive to gain from that in the long run.

The solution is within

Our agency has published thousands of unique pieces of content in the last 10 months. I know how easy it is to get sucked into the idea of trying to go viral to pump metrics or posting blog links when your creative brain just isn’t working how it should.

What we’ve learned time and time again from our own clients and others is that original content that connects your audience to what you’re building is 10x more valuable than trying to go viral with trending content.

I know how difficult that can be if you’re not chronically online or so online that your brain is fatigued. Next week, I’m going to talk about how to develop a sustainable stream of good content ideas that don’t require magic or huge budgets to produce.

That's a wrap, folks! But before you go...

Let me know what you think about this newsletter. Your feedback goes a long way (seriously, I read & respond to every email—good or bad!)

See you next week,