My Bet for Social Media Virality in 2024 is on Educational Content

It's time to stop treating organic social as second fiddle to paid.

As rising digital ad costs continue to yank at the threads of profitability, I find myself increasingly evangelical about the power of organic social content. For the first time since Buzzfeed was king of your Facebook feed, virality is achievable! And this time, you don’t even need a big following.

It’s past time to stop treating organic social as an afterthought or an intern’s job, especially while paid social churns through marketing budget at many times the cost of hiring a social media manager.

I’ve long held an axiom about organic social media marketing that has become the lens through which I plan and evaluate content. It’s that people come to brands on social media for two things: 1) entertainment, and 2) education. Nothing else. With few exceptions, those are the only buckets of content that people are sharing, and comprise most of the highly engaged content. Not launches, not cute aesthetic posts, and usually not your company’s behind the scenes content.

Not every brand needs to be as entertaining as Netflix on Instagram.

Educate

So, how can a brand entertain? Honestly, most can’t and shouldn’t. If you’re great at humour on social media, you know it, and if you have to ask, don’t try. If it’s in your DNA, far be it from me to discourage your brand’s expression! But for most brands I advise, it’s a safe bet to focus on education.

Now, I do use the label “education” loosely. A drone gliding over lush Tasmanian forests? That’s education for a travel audience. A review of Tame Impala’s new album? That’s education for a live music audience.

Does your brand sell organic detergent? Your social media should lead with cleaning tips & sustainability, not photos of your product. Do you sell cooking classes? Post quick kitchen tips and food ideas, not just promotions for your events.

Even musicians on TikTok are educating their potential fans about making music - something we never would have imagined seeing in a label’s social media strategy in any previous point in history.

This goes beyond CPG; Tiktok has brought on an explosion of longform educational content in every category. Rather than simply pushing their new releases, musicians are often growing their reach by explaining how songs are made.

I recently got to exercise this strategy at BestSelf, which sells journals and conversation cards. For years, they had been posting daily about their products, and gathered a huge following thanks to their consistency. However, I felt engagement could improve, and found a low-lift opportunity to recycle the founder’s tweets and start replacing product photos in the calendar with other educational content. Within a month, engagement tripled as we started making content that was worth sharing. Instagram Shop sales spiked too, since we used the final slide on each post to tie it back to our products.

This post was 10 slides long and still became the most engaged post ever, beating years of end-of-year sales posts. Make a post useful and people will engage, even when it’s lengthy.

Focus on the brand category & values

We all know there’s a difference between selling a thing and selling an idea. We’re selling stuff, but our customers are buying our brand. So why do marketers spend so much time creating social media content that’s only about the item for sale instead of also spending time communicating the brand, its category and its values?

Repeat ad nauseum

The new video algorithms make a content strategist’s job a lot easier. A video has the potential to reach far beyond your followers, and all you have to do is make the same kind of video over and over again once you’ve identified a formula that works. Eventually, some of them will go viral.

(A side note on virality: both TikTok and Reels have significantly longer tails than Instagram or Facebook posts, meaning that even if you don’t see success on the day they were posted, you may check back months later and be delighted to find they’re the main driver of traffic to your profile.)

Truly Beauty (2.3M followers) is a master of this technique: go through their TikTok and you’ll see dozens, if not hundreds of similar “shaving ASMR” videos with millions of views. That’s just one of the formulas they recycle: another bucket is videos titled some variation of “How I Finally Cleared My Acne”.

And if you’re more of the entertaining type, repeating a winning formula over and over again does still work, as Jacob Collier demonstrates with his “audience choirs”.

This extreme level of repetition is admittedly more suited to TikTok than Instagram, since IG serves a brand’s content to its followers more than TikTok does. On TikTok, there’s no risk of sounding like a broken record. (However, Hotels.com also does a version of this on Instagram Reels with great success.)

Don’t forget about YouTube Shorts

The neglected little sister in this conversation also happens to have been massively undervalued by brands this year. Google spent the year pouring huge amounts of money and attention into its vertical video feature on YouTube so as not to fall behind the rest of the digital landscape. Not everyone’s using it, but the competition is so low that it’s crazy not to take advantage of being an early player in the space when all it takes is recycling the same content that’s already on TikTok or Instagram. More importantly, it’s the only platform with decent search, so you can strategise to win keywords the same way you would with blog posts.

So there it is: in 2024, I’ll be using education to sell the brand, not the stuff, and repeating winning formulas to reach beyond existing audiences, including on YouTube Shorts.

Leave a comment if you agree/disagree - would love to know your thoughts!