On Social Media, Sell Your Brand, Not Your Stuff

by Lee Simmons

It’s a marketer’s dream: What could be better than having viewers voluntarily send your branded content to friends (and “friends”), saying, “You gotta see this!” Chasing that dream, companies today are moving more and more of their media spend to social channels. It’s a natural evolution — business goes where the buyers are, and nowadays that’s on the platforms.

But what kind of content works best on social media? Opinions abound; evidence, not so much. “There’s been very little real-world research on this,” says Harikesh S. Nair, a professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business. The problem is data: Facebook could do it, but each commercial user on Facebook sees only its own metrics; there hasn’t been a way to draw general insights.

So Nair, along with Dokyun Lee of Carnegie Mellon and Kartik Hosanagar of the Wharton School, hooked up with an analytics firm that gathers daily performance figures for some 800 business users of Facebook. By pooling the data for more than 100,000 posts — and using novel machine-learning techniques to characterize their content — the researchers published a paper that offers real answers that companies can use to optimize their social media strategies.