MEDIA MAY BE SOCIAL BUT CONTENT IS STILL KING

As YouTube unleashes its promised ‘exclusive original content’ on its US-based subscription-only ‘YouTube Red’ service, we are reminded, once again, that social media is constantly evolving.

YouTube Red was launched with the aim of providing exclusive content in an ad-free online environment. Its arrival served as a wake-up call: the online democratisation of communication through multiple channels has to be paid for somewhere by someone. As ubiquitous as digital communication may seem to the YouTube generation, business models for the big providers are still fluid.

So, what does all that mean for the future of social media? First of all, we need to move away from the idea that social media is purely about engagement and understand and accept that it is also about content. Indeed, YouTube is so convinced of the appetite for good content that it’s taken a risk on a paid for model.

Those of us who work in the communications business will watch with interest to find out whether the ‘exclusive’ content will lure subscribers and how this influences the development of social media from here in. For me, YouTube Red is one more example of how online communication mirrors the traditional print media routes of advertising or subscription based revenue generation as an enabler for quality, free to access content.

Indeed, there is greater synergy between print media and social media than many digital specialists would like to admit – which is one of the many reasons why it makes sense to manage both online and offline communications with an integrated approach from a single team capable of creating incisive content, whether it be a feature articles, comments or blogs.

While social media interaction provides an invaluable platform for engagement that has revolutionised the way we communicate, that engagement continues to be driven be high quality content. The main difference is that, rather than just reading articles from the pages of a magazine and sharing it with a Post It note on a colleague’s desk, we’re often accessing content via a mobile device and sharing it instantly with a limitless audience online.

The problem is that the instant and unmoderated nature of social media makes it a risky business for some companies. As a construction PR agency, we often find that more conservative sectors are still too cautious to dip their toe in the water, while others have encountered the fall out of an uncoordinated approach, which, at best, can result in a scattergun that delivers no strategic gain and, at worst, can be dangerously off message.

Social media has been hailed by many as the future of communication, and not without good reason. For me, however, social media must be treated by commercial users as the means of amplifying other content – whether that content is on or offline, generated internally or shared from third parties.

We are bombarded by information and the volume of white noise is still increasing. The only way to stand out on social media against that backdrop is to make what you say, meaningful, colourful and of genuine substance.