Our social media evolution (keeps evolving)

👋 Hola! Welcome to Out of Singapore. This is Shan and I write every Sunday on business and marketing. Today we will talk about building a business with social media help. We moved from zero focus on social media to that becoming our biggest sales channel. We are still evolving and that makes it a great time to share our past one year journey and learnings from social media.

Here’s an honest fact - I have been a social media noob. For the longest period, I have seen it as a “problem” and avoided it. In fact, I never believed social media made sense for business until about 2 years ago. Recording moments of life and sharing with friends and strangers was the weirdest thing for me. You don’t believe me? You check my post history on Instagram.

Before we begin, here are some initial writings on social media. Each is a gold nugget read. If you got some time, give them a read and share your thoughts with me.

This one establishes social media as channel for sales and not just branding.

Social media as sales channel?

This one advocates that consumer brands should act like a media publishing business.

DTC #106: It's actually a media business

This one shares how we built a network of over 300 creators, posting daily content for the brand, without any upfront fees.

DTC 115: Building a creator seeding program

Moving on, today we will cover these topics -

1. What have we done in last 12 months?

2. Three hygiene rules of social media.

3. The formula to grow social media.

4. What should we do next? My thoughts.

Let’s begin. I will writing style brief and short.

#1 What have we done in last 12 months?

Our social media journey started around Aug 2023 and till date we have 540+ posts on Instagram. Seems like a lot until you look at the follower count - 1579 followers on 11 Nov, 7 PM. We have decided to give the follower count a break, and just keep creating. Here is how this has evolved in 12+ months.

1. Stage 1 - We posted 2-3 times a week, sometimes even less. These were basic product pictures and captions. This was entirely outsourced to a freelancer based in Italy. There was little to no communication. Hence, no relation to what we were doing on the ground in Singapore. This was just enough to keep presence on social media alive.

2. Stage 2 - Stopped freelancer engagement and decided to take do things in-house. I found “educational text” posts to be the most impactful and fastest to start with. We started this in Feb 2024 and continued until August. We moved to almost daily posting frequency. We started seeing more saves. This phase told us people are not sleeping well (all our sleep related posts did well).

3. Stage 3 - Enter the face and authenticity phase. We moved from static posts to videos. Now on a daily basis, we give our followers a sneak peek of what we are upto. Almost everyone in the office is now part of the social media page. We have done commercial ads, trends and informational content.

Now that the basic ground work is laid out, we need to start building for scale and value. That’s stage 4. Jump to section #4 to read about the future of social media.

By the way, did you notice this changes in our social media before reading this?

#2 Three hygiene rules on social media

Beyond the three rules, I will give you bonus cookie at the end. Haha, let’s see the three main hygiene rules of social media.

Rule 1: Post frequently and consistently

Post frequently and consistently, everyday or every 2-3 days. The consistency should not break. If you promise to drop content every 2 days, do it every 2 days, no matter what. Daily frequency, with a mix of stories, reels and posts is the best. The volume would stories > reels > post.

My team hates me for making them do this everyday, but there is no option. To survive, we need to grind everyday, no matter what.

Rule 2: Be responsive and communicate

Comments, and DMs must be promptly responded. The sooner the better. Please don’t act like a big brand and delay responses by 24 or 48 hours. Delay of each second costs you credibility and a possible customer. As a new brand, prospective customers test you by asking questions. They test you by leaving negative comments. If you respond, engage and clarify, you will win.

In fact, the trick is to send DMs to prospective customers. There are millions of creators who are not huge with 100K followers but diligently working on creating their profile. Some of them will be your customers. DM them, request them to try the products without condition. They will ask questions and teach you more about normal consumers. Here again, volume matters. 10-20 creators make no difference, but 500 and 1000 creators make a ton of difference. For global outreach, this number would be even higher.

Rule 3: Do not sell

Instead educate and give an option to buy. The option to buy is called “CTA”. The CTA to learn more or check the product page with pricing details. Drive interest, engage and then make it easy to buy. However, consumers should not feel like being sold to.

This point needs more explanation, and I will write details on this another time.

Bonus rule - Don’t overthink

I may have said this a thousand times, don’t overthink your actions. Post frequently and consistently. Let the viewers give you feedback. Let them comment, dislike, be angry or disappointed with you. Allow them to be part of your growth journey. Always listen to the feedback and show change asap. Implement these feedback into your planning and execution. Don’t be miserly and defensive on this. The final viewer holds all the power.

Do you follow these rules?

#3 The formula to achieve social media scale

Let’s look at the formula

Social media success = (Product x distribution) x scale

Social media success can be defined as viewership, reach or likes. At a later stage, you can customize your success metric.

Product refers to content, since the product on social media is the content that you produce. Distribution refers to all the places and platforms the content gets “distributed” to. Some examples of distribution are social media pages on different platforms and collaborators (creator accounts). Social media content can be distributed into traditional publications and online blogs as well.

Finally, scale refers to the volume of each activity - the volume of content and volume of distribution. The more the merrier. The more the scale, the more the digital presence and more the touch points for prospective customers.

Tell me, is this framework intuitive?

#4 What should we do next? My thoughts.

Social media needs to serve a purpose for our “interested consumer” group and specific wellness community. This could be

1. Entertain - Make users laugh, smile, frown, anger, tear, or awe.

2. Educate users about longevity, wellness and supplements. This allows consumers to learn and adapt to their unique life and lifestyle.

3. Inform users about longevity, wellness and supplements. This is almost one-way communication about us, products and the industry.

4. Customer service - Use this to answer questions, FAQs, problems that consumers face. They could ask all and any questions about products and our service. Some brands used to have a specific Twitter handle only for customer service.

Social media is possibly the only channel today that displays brand personality. As the next stage, I would like the SM content to show our personality and entertain users.

What would this personality be? Here are some thoughts -

1. The Redbull content - Work on extreme challenges with creators and athletes, and others chasing extremities in life. Longevity in fact is about extremities.

2. Empowering GenX and Millennial life - These two groups of people are ones chasing health and wellness goals. They crossed a certain age and wish to be empowered. We could work on everyday things that leads toward good health. My only worry is that it will be too boring. Making it fun and entertaining will be a challenge (really?).

I have these two pathways in mind at the moment. We will select one and move forward. Once I get a better sense of things, we can evolve.

That’s a wrap for today. Tell me if you didn’t find something convincing.

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Thanks for reading again. If you haven’t liked the post yet, please do press the heart button🙏.

I spent half of this week in Jeju islands. It was my first time there, and I felt absolutely wonderful. It gave mini-Hokkaido vibes but with very people. Not crowded, extremely beautiful and great weather. Food and accommodation is expensive but the experience makes up for it. I will plan a few more trips to Jeju soon.

Guess what? We danced to Apt in the car and the club. Haha, it was fun!

Jisoo is jealous

I need to stop talking about Rosé 🫠. Jisoo doesn’t like it.

Thank you and hope this read was worthwhile. We are in our Singles Day week and tomorrow onwards we need to fight a battle everyday. Cannot lose a single day.

You have a great week ahead! Cheers. 🥛🥛🥛🥛🥛