30 Single-Sentence Lessons from Social Media Week NYC 2016

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Social Media Week New York 2016 took place from February 22-26 and I was
lucky enough to plant myself in NYC and soak in all the social media wisdom I could.  Here some of the tactical lessons I took away from Social Media Week NYC 2016:

1. Get really good at using Facebook Pixels to target your clients and prospects.
2. People who aren’t yet raving fans of your company shouldn’t receive offers on social media, warm them up with inspirational, funny, or wildly informative stuff.
3. Worrying about your follower count instead of your follower engagement is like worrying about sales and not worrying about profit.
4. The internet is no longer about how to get people to come to your site, it’s about how do you bring your company to people.
5. The best way to get your company in front of people is by creating excellent content, and posting it on social media where if your content is good enough people will trade their time for paying attention to your company.
6. Focus on one social handle per social media channel (1 Twitter handle, 1 Instagram handle, 1 Facebook page) and make it really good, don’t divide your attention between multiple handles.
7. Comedy is the #1 thing that works on social media.
8. For the first time in measurable history, more people associate themselves with their sense of humour than any other aspect of their personality (more than their ethnicity, religion, educational background, citizenship, etc).
9. Instagram can be slightly edgier than Facebook because the demographic skews 5-7 years younger.
10. Don’t automate anything besides collecting analytics.
11. The Wall Street Journal has 26 individuals on it’s social media team, CNN has 40, Mashable has 18.
12. The use of ad-blockers is increasing at a rate of 65% per year (and getting faster).
13. In a 2-3 year period it’s reasonable to think that websites will not be able to make money with banner ads because of the use of ad-blockers.
14. The four marketing P’s (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) are being replaced by the 4 E’s (Experience, Value Equation, Everywhere, Engagement). NOTE: the “E’s” need some explanation, email me at [email protected] for clarification.
15. DO EPIC SH!T ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND EVERYTHING WILL WORK OUT.
16. Buzzfeed has had the best success creating content that doesn’t drive people back to their website, rather they do the best with content that is meant to only live on social media (NOTE: It is speculated that Buzzfeed is worth $1.5 billion dollars).
    
17. Square videos and photos, on average, generate the largest amount of mobile screen real estate.
18. Buzzfeed says that using people and faces in their videos, as opposed to products only, always works better.
19. Sharing content is now done on a more intimate level with just several close friends who would like the content, as opposed to posting the content publicly for all followers to see (Ie. “Oh I bet Chris, Dave and Pat would really like this article.”)
20. The majority of videos watched on Facebook are watched without sound.
21. CNN startup subsidiary Great Big Story cares very little about designing his website for desktops because more than 80% of their traffic is mobile.
22. 360 video today is where YouTube was 7 years ago; lots of people are searching for good video but very few people are creating good video.
23. If you’re looking at your traffic stats and wondering what “Direct” traffic is: it’s social traffic from mobile social apps.
24. 70% of social media sharing is “Dark” and will not be attributed to social media web traffic because it appears within “Direct Traffic”.
25. 50% of all traffic that comes from social media will be buried within “Direct traffic”.
26. A Shareable brand = BEING DARING + BEING UNIQUE
27. There is no reason to be sitting in brainstorming about what you think your customers might like on social media, Facebook already knows the answer so start testing and retesting with small campaigns and seeing what your customers respond best to.
28. Social media allows tiny social media focused companies to compete with mega-brands who have “buy an NFL stadium money” (Ie. You can be damn sure Gillette is worried about Dollar Shave Club even though it’s less than 1/100th the size).
29. The pinnacle of advertising used to be the Super Bowl which cost over $10 million dollars and was either a smash hit (in which case your ad would be lumped in with all the other smash hits) or it was a spectacularly expensive failure, if you were to spend $10 million dollars on a social media campaign you would be almost assured success.
30. Social media has unlimited scale; if you spend more you will be guaranteed to have your content distributed to more people, the same can’t be said for traditional media.