Why social strategy and communications strategy are merging (and what it means for you)
The more I speak to different strategy leads from all over, the more I am convinced that social and comms will inevitably smoosh together. Or at least, that there's a high value opportunity in them doing so.
Back when I was at VCCP, I remember a head of planning for their health division asked me to talk her through how I wrote a social strategy. We were working together on a pitch, so she was curious about my process and how it intertwined with hers and her team's.
How a social strategy brief actually works
So I started laying out a rough order of events in an ideal scenario:
We interrogate the client brief to determine business, marketing and communications objectives, the last of which starts giving us some clues about the potential roles for social, and what we need to measure to prove we were successful.
We spend time trying to understand the target audience(s) they're trying to reach, and isolating motivations and barriers for why they may or may not want this product or our brand.
We look at how competitors are currently delivering on those motivations and needs, or not, in order to determine how we might want to either focus on something that is differentiating to us, or at the very least say the same thing in a distinct way.
This gives us the ingredients to isolate what the audience wants but may not have right now, or any hidden barriers that have not been called out by competitors and therefore may play as strong category entry points for people to choose us.
We then go back into the audience data and determine which platforms they're most likely to be in, and what for, and what those platforms allow you to do and reward you for doing, because knowing basic algorithmic distribution is important.
We combine all of that into a simple social comms framework that looks at: objectives, barrier, role of social, role of channels, core themes and messages, ways in, measures of success.
This took me about 10 minutes of explaining, and she was quite patient, curious and silent throughout. And then at the end, she said:
"So it's basically like writing a communications strategy?"
Yep. So it is. The channel mix changes and therefore so do the tactical approaches, but at its core it's basically like a comms strategy.
And this is a hill I increasingly see myself not dying on, but stepping on and having a go at arguing for it. The smoosh of social and comms is real, because good social strategy is born out of comms strategy fundamentals, and good comms strategy helps direct how a brand should show up in social, alongside all other media of course.
Where social and comms strategy still differ
Now, of course, there are distinctions:
Comms strategy looks at a much wider audience and media context than just social, and often social is a tiny part of it (though from a budget perspective, increasingly less so)
Social strategy is full of platform-specific nuances which often are the difference between being right and being noticeable (and knowing how to do TikTok is different from doing idents)
But as the job market implodes and we need to wear more hats to do our jobs, I find that whenever I talk about smooshing social strategy and comms strategy thinking, there's a moment of relief from clients.
What the smoosh means for strategy roles today
It's almost as if, for better and for worse, we're now market-correcting for an over-specialisation of roles, and instead we're now trying to work out how to best bring disciplines together to generate value. The harsh part is when that bringing together happens in one person.
This isn't a dig at comms strategy or social strategy, and most certainly I'm not saying you can't succeed in our industry if you can't combine both. In many places, specialisation still works, and job descriptions and remits will dictate a lot of what's possible/allowed.
But the signals as I see them are increasingly clear. The smoosh of skills is underway, and from my corner of the world, I can't imagine writing social strategy without putting my comms strategy hat on, and I can't imagine writing a comms strategy without imagining somewhere in my mind if this would help unlock a TikTok format.
