Which is King? Content vs Conversation

Back when everyone began migrating to social networks, brands swiftly followed by building pages of their own and communicating with their current and prospective customers.  With the majority of consumers having one social networking profile or another, it just made perfect sense for brand to follow. But it’s like a field of dreams – just because you build it, doesn’t mean they will come.  So the question quickly arose – what are we doing on here? What is the best strategy to make this work for us? 

Almost immediately, experts began to tout, “Content is king.” In his article entitled “Content is king of social marketing,” Michael Greenberg makes two distinct points. First, social marketing efforts need to be driven by content; that without it, there is not a whole lot to talk about.  That’s pretty much why people would want to follow or “Like” a brand page. I mean, they’re not one of our friends, so they’re not posting pictures of themselves, sharing recipes we might be interested in or keeping us updated on things going on in their lives. So they pretty much have to keep our attention somehow, and content is the way to do it.

Greenberg’s second point is, given that you have content, cadence is king. Once you make a content promise, you really have to keep it or you will lose that following you worked so hard to get. He gives the great example of BusinessWeek and how its readers would be in an uproar should they just decide to skip a week.

But Catherine Novak offers a different perspective. In her article entitled, “Why conversation, not content, is king,” she gives credit to Cory Doctorow who originally coined the phrase. She goes on to explain how conversation is indicative of consumer engagement and that content is just something to talk about. How true is this when the success of every post, photo and/or video is basically dependent on the number of Likes, comments, shares, retweets, etc.?  She goes on to explain that content without conversation is just broadcasting, or advertising. Once it hits the consumer, it just stops there, and they may act on it someday.

I tend to agree with the latter argument. Content was king prior to 2009 when Facebook added the Like button. Back then, people scrolled through their timelines with the purpose of simply reading other people’s posts. But when that Like button came, social networking took on a whole new meaning. Now, there are hundreds of cute kids holding signs asking for Likes. There are photos of soldiers and law enforcement officers asking for Likes. Businesses use number of Likes as a key performance indicator for both their social network pages and posts. That’s because the number of Likes determines the virility of a post, and therefore will tell you how engaging that post was.   

That’s just Facebook. Think about Twitter and how the number of retweets determines the performance of a particular tweet, or Instagram and YouTube with the number of Likes. Factor in the number of shares and you can clearly see that conversation is king now, and that content is just something to talk about.