Can Social Media Save Big Media?


“Will it make us money?” is the main question skeptical media CEOs ask me about investing in social media. I am here to argue that social will make your media brand money, but not in the way you might think.

For the record, none of the global media companies we work with, around the world, generate more than 10% of the their overall revenue from their digital departments…yet.

The main complaint we hear from senior media executives is they spend a large portion of their time working on the digital part of the business, yet it generates such a small amount of the overall revenue.


The challenge today is that many media CEOs want to monetize the audience asthey build it. Sort of like charging people to see your theatre show while your rehearse. Mark Zuckerberg spent 6 years and millions per day on server costs building the Facebook user base before he showed them one ad.

We have a lot of data to look at with over 30 social media ecosystem implementations at major media organizations such as television networks, radio stations, and newspaper companies.

One overall strategy stands out:

Frequently posting entertaining content, designed specifically for each social media platform, keeps your brand top of mind with your audience, and leads to high engagement on social, rating increases, increased video views, more website traffic, and subscription increases.


We have been following this formula since 2010. This a link to a white paper we wrote on the subject, specific to radio stations, that high frequency posting on Facebook can drive ratings — here.

CASE STUDY: Social media can help new audiences find your brand. For example: when we looked at online data from our classic rock radio station clients — we found a surprising anomaly. The generally older skewing classic rock stations had a large spike of 16–18 year old boys liking their Facebook pages and turning up at concerts.We drilled down into the data and found that most of the younger demographic had been playing the video game ‘Rock Band’ in their teens. The game featured mostly guitar rock songs from bands in the 70’s and 80’s. Even though the young men were not the target demographic they found the brand and listened to the station regularly.

RECOMMENDATIONS: To help your brand build audiences and generate revenue, here are some strategic recommendations:

  1. Treat social media like another broadcast stream for your brand: Like a broadcast signal — social media is 24/7 — post hourly to each platform.
  2. Use the engagement data from each platform to determine which 3 or 4 platforms you will focus on.
  3. Do not promote or sell anything on your social media platforms. Entertain. Link off your social to a place where people expect to be sold to: website, newsletter, webvideo, etc
  4. Avoid building generic content that might work on all platforms, instead develop platform specific content that will engage audiences.
  5. Focus on Facebook first but not Facebook only. Facebook has over 1 Billion monthly active users. It dwarfs everything else and even the people who don’t like it are on it.
  6. Monitor data weekly on all your social media platforms — from your Facebook page or Twitter page insights to your Youtube analytics. All this data is free. Use it.

Change your culture. Train the people you pay the most, who know your brand best, on how to use social media effectively (on-air staff, senior executives). It takes less than 30 minutes a day to maintain a good personal social media footprint. You need to use it everyday like your audience does.


EFFICIENCY: Avoid hiring more people for your organization. Make the people you have more efficient.

  1. On-air staff creating social media helps marketing and promotions.
  2. Use instant messaging services with group chats like Skype or Slack HQ to reduce internal email by 50%.
  3. Outsource your organization’s email to Google Apps to reduce spam and allow real time collaboration on documents, spreadsheets, and calendars.
  4. Stay ahead of your audience. Ensure everyone in your organization is using either an iPhone or an Android smartphone. A Nokia study found that, on average, people check their mobile phones 150 times per day every 6 minutes.

Finally, our philosophy is simple: social media is like the phone. Decades ago only a few people had phones on their desks. Then everyone had one, best practices were established for how to communicate effectively on the device, and training was required. For media brands we feel the same way about social media. From the CEO down to the interns everyone who works in a media company needs to know the basics of social media for business (it is different from managing your personal social media). Once everyone starts using the platforms, everything will change: the type of people you hire, the conversations in meetings, and the way you interact and monetize your audiences. Then, the audiences will arrive and the advertisers will follow.

Questions or corrections: tweet at me @gavinmcgarry

My Next Post: How Big Media Companies Can Monetize Social Media: A Case Study