An often overlooked truth about Social Media campaigns is that, today, there’s plenty of “empirical data” to work with. Whilst there’s a huge human element, groups of people do respond to some things in the same approximate way. Meaning it is possible to critically analyse and pre-determine how effective a particular type of campaign is likely to be.

I was recently performing a competitive analysis for one of my clients, and noticed how few clicks, likes & comments all the restaurant Facebook recipe/food photos posts get. It’s a lot of effort for restaurants to push these out, (especially if it’s not being outsourced to an agency) and unlike what conventional Social Media strategy suggests – it’s not getting much return (at least for the restaurants I sampled). So why bother? Put the time & effort where into aspects of the campaign where it’ll actually help.

Don’t blindly follow Social Media trends, objectively analysing your competitors can provide good indications as to what you should and shouldn’t be doing. Whilst you can’t photocopy someone else’s success, you can learn from it.