Passion, Purpose, Play: Building A Successful Social Brand In 2019

It’s probably the hardest time for marketers to make an impact, ever. Torn between competing channels and buzzwords, fickle consumers, and contradictory marketing science, we have to navigate a world that challenges us to be faster, smarter, harder working and ultimately sell more. Nowhere is this harder than on social media. The average non-marketer has a similar experience.

- Alex Watts

IT’S POSSIBLE to be an infinite consumer, jumping from feed to feed. The most recent numbers from YouTube report that users upload 400 hours of video per minute — a staggering 65 years of video every day. Instagram reports 500 million daily active users of Instagram Stories alone — assuming those stories are only 6 seconds long, that’s 95 years of content per day. That’s just two of the many platforms we use every day.

The attention economy is real, and for most people — exhausting. Imagining that we can change perceptions by doing things the way we always have is dangerous.

This year also represents the real start of the US election cycle — and in Australia, state and federal elections that will dominate newsfeeds across the board.

There’s also the looming threat of climate-related disasters that are directly impacting the communities we talk to every day, which will ultimately impact how they buy — and the time they have to consider our brands.

The following approaches are important not only because they reflect the core of why people use social in 2019, but how brands can actively participate in that those behaviors of usage — and the type of work we need to make to make a difference to how our brands are perceived.

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