Social media managers today can be divided into two groups (roughly speaking, of course):
1. Those who stick to hard metrics and let data determine their decisions.
2. Those who trust their intuition and just go ahead and post what they feel is right.
So what group do you belong to? Well, you should belong to both.
Out of the blue comes… nothing
As written earlier, if you apply social science and the concept of ‘social creativity‘ it becomes evident that you cannot be successful in social if you cannot perform social creativity, i.e. if you’re not capable of adding something new (that’s the creative part) and value adding to the social group you’re engaging with.
However, social creativity very rarely adds value if it’s not rooted in the a firm understanding of the behaviour and history of that social group.
The conclusion?
This leads to a very clear conclusion about what social media managers should do in order to be successful:
1. Use metrics, data, theory and knowledge to give you a firm understanding, and keep measuring so you can get even wiser down the road – but don’t use data to decide what you post, when you post it etc.
Data should be used to review the past.
2. Make sure to maintain an explorative, improvisational and authentic approach on a day-to-day basis, and try to avoid setting up very tangible, quantitative goals for the performance of your social media programme – in a social game, it’s just not right to judge a success only by the numbers.
The human touch, the intuition should guide the now, i.e. content creation and the actual posting (don’t pre-plan any posts!).
The more long-term, strategic decisions (the future) should be based on a combination of the two.
Then again…
That being said, I realise that there are quite big differences between brands and industries.
For instance, in a start-up phase in social you don’t have much data and will tend to put more weight on the explorative part.
But when quantity and data is in place, the mode will likely – or should – shift to a more data-driven approach – even on a day-to-day level (again, depending on the brand and the strategy).