A customer’s time is precious. Don’t waste it with bad social media content!

This article is about time, so I won’t waste yours and cut right to the chase.

As a digital marketer on social media, forget about likes, clicks or video views. When it comes to brand marketing the single most important metric of success is time. The time customers spend with your brand through your content.

If that makes perfect sense to you and your marketing stack is already aligned for time, perfect. Move along, have fun diving right into the metaverse and NFTs.

But if you’re like, “huh, who in their right minds would want to spend time with a brand unless they’re working for that brand or get paid otherwise”, welcome to the fray.

Of course, we’d all rather binge-watch a series on Netflix or listen to Spotify’s latest Joe Rogan podcast instead of spending time with brands.

Oh wait, aren’t these brands too? Brands that successfully occupy minutes, hours even, of our day, every day.

Could it be that we make a distinction between one brand we want to spend time with and another we want to just get things done with as quickly as possible?

Usually the reason why we deal with any brand in the first place is a product or service we need. But in this day and age both these things are means to an end. Enablers to a lifestyle.

The most valuable products or services are those that fix problems and help us get to where we want to spend more time on, without wasting too much time in the process.

From this sobering angle, it would render most brands as fleeting tools for customers in the pursuit of quality time. Time to connect with other people, collect unique experiences and go on personal growth journeys. Essentially compiling a treasure trove of memories and skills that give meaning to our lives.

But what is the glue that holds all these treasures together?

Humans are social being. You should have heard that in plenty of webinars by now.

Being social means communicating with one another, exchanging information and ideas. The way we communicate is through stories. Always has been, always will.

Enter: content. The vessel of stories. The beacon of the communal experiences, be it online or offline. The guardian of culture.

And herein lies the opportunity for brands to be relevant beyond the transactional touchpoint. Optimise your product to get the job done, so customers need to spend the least amount of time using it. In addition, offer value-adding content that keeps customers within the brand ecosystem.

And no, I’m not talking about 15 seconds pre-roll trailers or retargeted web banners.

CONTENT! Not display.

Stories unique to your brand. Stories that customers would want to spend time on exploring. Stories that would leave people wanting for more.

Emotive. Inspirational. Useful. Communicating a value system that anyone can identify with.

To get there, let’s understand the concept of time and what it means to customers (or any social media user) first.

Chances are you landed on this article by scrolling through your social media feed. Ask yourself, what made you stop scrolling? What made you click the link? What made your brain run this split second investment calculation that ended with “let me spend my time on reading this, before turning on Netflix”?

Time is finite

We all have a very clear concept of how much time we have. There are only 24 hours in a day. Do I spend them worthwhile or am I wasting them away on things that could have been an email? Or, worse yet, being stuck with problem solving services that should work with a simple click and swipe, but obviously don’t?

Time forces us to clarity in thinking. It forces us to focus. It trains us making decisions in the most effective manner even. Spending time on making a decision on how to spend time is an exponential waste spiral. So our brains are experts at making immediate assessments on where to place our temporal bets on the basis of what offers more value in return?

It’s simple rational thinking that is often mistaken for shortened attention spans.

Time is precious

When it comes to content, marketers have been fed the goldfish theory for years now. But the hurting truth cuts a bit deeper. It’s not the length of the content, but its quality. Then again, content quality is a highly subjective matter.

So let me approach this with an example:

Imagine you’re meeting a friend for lunch. You’re having a great conversation catching up. Then your friend starts to tell a story what happened at the office last week. 10 minutes in and you got no clue where this is going. Everything is all over the place. Every detail seems to be important for no reason and without context provided. Soon you lose interest. Your mind wanders off to take a shy peak at the phone on the table.

That’s what most brand content feels like. A constant broadcast stream of information that’s not even half as interesting or relevant to customers as brands like to think. And when customers start to ‘peak at their phones’ brands say “Oi, that’s rude, your attention span is too short!”

Why would I want to spend time with something that can’t get to the point?

Think of it as a classic elevator pitch. Fail to make an idea stick within seconds and the investor (customer) will walk away. The ride is over. One shot, that’s it.

Time is trust

Back to the principles of human interaction. Building trust always requires building a relationship first. Naturally, that takes time. As humans, we don’t trust anyone we just met. Trust only develops over the course of shared experiences. While that’s straightforward for people, how can ‘faceless’ brands achieve a similar status?

This’s where the content journey comes in. Once the ‘elevator pitch’ content hooked customers to place an attention investment, content should open up a guided rabbit hole to explore more. A long term content experience that needs to pay off over time.

In marketing terms, that doesn’t mean moving a customer down the funnel. But rather, it’s a fragmented, non-linear journey across the entire stack of digital marketing channels, including social media platforms, with a mix of serial and long form content.

I’ll leave discussing the intricacies of designing such journeys for another article, given today’s motto:

Taking all these psychological preferences around time into consideration, gearing marketing success metrics around watch time, time on page, scroll depth, or even the length of comments on social media posts, would be the logical next step.

Time remains an opaque dimension for marketers - hard to grasp and challenging to link back to business outcomes. Yet, it’s a clear indicator for content quality and resonance. That’s exactly where the beloved marketing buzzword comes into play: differentiator.

In an environment with brand content overload and performance numbers in free fall, yet ever increasing demand for more, daily and fresh content online by social media users, every brand fights over the last remaining piece of the customer attention investment pie.

Just run the daily numbers for yourself: 7hrs sleep + 9hrs work + 1hr shopping + 1hr workout + 2hrs Netflix + … = 0.000000x hrs for your brand.

As established above, attention is a conscious value decision. One that opens even more conscious business decisions down the road once a trust relationship is established.

And that’s where the real task for marketers lies. How to connect the dots? How to make content be part of the product or an extension to the service instead of shovelling click bot traffic from left to right? And, with that, how to make time spend drive business outcomes?