The Brutal Truth About Social Media For Venues - Why Nothing Worked Until We Took It In House.
Social media can be a valuable and dynamic tool for businesses that have venues full of activity, but it can cause headaches and become a real sticking point because it can be hard to navigate the right approach. Here we’re talking you through our real world story of how, when we were running our own businesses we went through every painful, stressful and sometimes costly option to run decent social media accounts. Every time we got it wrong, and how we ended up at the perfect solution that finally got us the results we wanted.
We’ve tried every social media fix in the book and failed spectacularly at most of them. We started blind and learned along the way.
For a little context we used to own and run competitive socialising venues in the east midlands - that’s 4 venues and 3 brands and a hell of a lot of social media to try and get done. We were running social media ads and always featured social media heavily in our marketing strategy - because that’s where our audience hangs out. So we needed to utilise social media and have decent accounts to support our paid ads activity and funnel people into our wider marketing efforts.
Over the space of a few years we cycled through a few conventional options
Before we reached the ideal solution - Social Media Integration
So after years of trying every approach - agencies, staff hires, doing it ourselves - we finally cracked it. So here’s the story.
The Owner Burnout Era - Why trying to wear all the hats might work at first, but leads to the death of your social media accounts
I’m sure this is where we all start. In the early days of building a business (especially if you were born with the “I can do it myself” gene) you wear all the hats for a few reasons.
To keep costs low - It’s likely social media budgets aren’t huge
To keep it all close to you - Letting someone loose on your social media can feel like you’re letting them into your house.
You want to learn - knowing more about how it works is actually a great thing in the long run.
Our first attempt at social media actually wasn’t a failure, it worked - until it didn’t. I was designing, filming and photographing all the content, curating it myself, posting and managing the platforms. And maybe if that would have been my full time job, it would have been more successful.
But as a business owner the reality of juggling the social media, marketing, design, operations and the other 1000’s of jobs that needs doing means it’s not always at the top of the list no matter how important you want it to be. Our inconsistency killed our momentum. And frantically posting at 2am while closing down the venue sure as hell isn’t going to help our reach. Passion doesn’t scale if there isn’t process.
So attempt 1 - “I’ll just do it myself” a 90% failure to say the least.
Outsourcing - The expensive Illusion
You're not crazy for thinking that outsourcing your social media to an agency or a freelancer is the dream. Leave it to the professionals right? Well - not from what we experienced, and it would seem it’s not all rosy for lots of other business friends and clients of ours who have come up against the same struggles.
Sure, there are some industries where outsourcing your social media literally solves all your problems and the detrimental effect of not being ‘in’ your business is barely noticeable. But when you’re talking about hospitality, competitive socialising or experienced based business with physical venues - the people, the business and its day to day existence is the life and soul of your social media. And when your agency can’t just move in and live there with you, there is a glaringly obvious disconnect when it comes to the content.
Agencies and freelancers are never going to know your business, its vibe, your brand and your operation as well as you and your team do. So it's likely you will get some lovely looking content - polished images, models to film videos and even influencers from super large accounts visiting your venue. But it still doesn’t land. Why? Because people don’t want to be sold to on social media, they don't want fancy professional images and they certainly don't care that someone from the other end of the country came to visit either.
They want to know if they will like it, if they will suit the vibe, and if you are a place where they can see themselves hanging out. And largely that's by showing them the real you. Your staff, your humor, your day to day operations, your offers. And seen as your staff are the front cover for all those qualities, they should be involved.
And I’m sure we don't need to bring to your attention the high retainers, setup costs, and fees to have a professional social media agency or freelancer do your socials for you. You can be looking at anything from £1000 -£3500k per month depending on the agency, and when their content flops, the frustration and kick in the teeth feeling you get really ain’t fun.
Ok so failure number 2 - outsourcing social media to the professionals. We gotta be getting close to the solution right?
The internal hire that became a headache - When you’ve got 99 problems and your social media manager doesn’t even solve 1.
Right-o. So outsourcing doesn't work and running yourself ragged isn't an improvement either. So surely creating an in-house role is the best of both worlds? That’s what we thought too. And with salaries for roles like content managers, designers and marketers not always being attainable, its easy to think one role could rule them all.
Here was our logic (and many of our clients too). One person dedicated to doing our social media. Knows the business, the processes, the products and the brand. Employed by us part time as a social media manager part time as a floor manager. We all collectively thought that we struck gold and all parties were excited at this new step for the business.
I bet you’re thinking “This is the last section right? They’ve cracked it!”. Well… let me tell you how it all unravelled:
The role quickly became too big, too misunderstood and undervalued.
In order for us to provide a full time salary they needed to do other marketing tasks outside of social media, which took away focus. The staff struggled to understand how the role worked and the floor hours quickly become more important when you’re trying to cover staff shortages.
Managing a new role in a business is just as time consuming as doing it yourself.
Expecting floor staff to become expert social media managers overnight isn’t realistic. Shaping the role, mentoring your staff member and helping the new role integrate into the business takes just as much of your time as it does theirs.
A disconnect between management expectations and actual execution
It was naive of us to expect a staff member with passion but no skills to hit it out of the park. Training a bartender on the intricacies of marketing was frustrating for us and overwhelming for them. 100% our fault and we learned that the hard way.
Conclusion? One person can’t carry the brand voice of an entire business (especially all 4 businesses in our case), and it’s not fair to expect them to. So attempt three isn't a complete failure, we learned a lot about focusing on socials via the staff, but expecting one person to fly the flag alone? We’ll call that failure number 3.
The lightbulb moment - Social media as an operational function.
So it took us a minute to get here, but we reckon we’ve finally cracked it. This was the realisation that changed everything. The whole team should be doing this.
It keeps it internal - the people who know, love and help us sail this ship should also be our biggest contributors.
It avoids costly roles, freelancers or agencies
It doesn’t land the responsibility solely on one person
And it leaves us free to run the rest of the business
High fives all round? Not just yet. Lets run through how we actually shaped the business to adopt social media as a standard operating procedure.
Turning social media into a system
The staff we have in our venues were great at their jobs. They took their tasks seriously, made sure they did what was expected for their job role, kept on top of compliance and completed all their checklists. So if they can do that without blinking, how do we get them to think about social media in the same way. And the simplest form of the answer is - we made social media the same weight, importance and ease to complete as any other task on their closing down checklist.
We formalised it - training the team how to do simple social media tasks like filming and editing. We added incentives for great contributions, and added deadlines just as we would to other parts of the job.
We embedded into our HR operations - recruitment, team management, contracts and disciplinaries
Took the technical out and put the fun back in - We dealt with content pillars and social media strategies and just asked them to capture real moments in the business.
We made it a part of the job - A manager wouldn’t leave for the night without locking up, they also wouldn’t clock off without completing their social media tasks either.
We re-framed what social media was for - stop selling and start buying: people’s attention. It's not a selling machine, it's a brand asset that's a part of your wider marketing strategy.
The magic happens when social media is a part of your company culture.
The results - When the team owned the content, the customers felt it.
We swapped follower counts for engagement stats and saw the relationship between social media and our website skyrocket. People were discovering us on social media and heading to our website to book. We saw our GA4 referral statistics trend upwards for Instagram and Facebook referrals and we experienced better performance on the paid ads on those platforms.
More importantly than that we felt it in the venue. People started saying “I saw you on social media” to the staff and their confidence started to grow. We were building genuine connections with people and securing brand loyalty.
Ok. You can finally give us that high five now, we really have cracked it.
Got reservations? - Don't think your team can achieve this?
We understand your trepidation, you might be thinking about your team and wondering how on earth you get that lot to start making decent content. Here’s a few things you might be thinking:
My team won’t do it. No one is confident on camera.
They don’t need to be influencers, they just need a system, some simple training and permission to be themselves.
What if my venue doesn’t have a ‘cool’ aesthetic or a trendy brand?
Doesn’t matter. Authenticity > aesthetics. People want real over perfection and we teach you exactly how to achieve that.
Our team changes a lot, we've got a high turnover and I dont want it to be wasted.
That’s why we build roles, processes and light training into your business. We also work on your recruitment processes to integrate social media so that your team changes over time.
We’ve tried doing it ourselves and it flopped.
Because you didn't have the right system. That’s exactly what the social media integration service is for. We find the opportunities in daily flow to make it easy, train your staff to do the work and put systems in place so that it doesn’t get left behind.
Got some other questions about how it might work for your business? Let’s chat.
You want in? That’s why we offer social media integration as one of our strongest services.
When we started Rogue State Studio, it was to make the exact products and services that we wished we had when we were operating businesses. To save businesses in the hospitality, competitive socialising and gaming or experienced based business industries the time and money on trial and error. Get straight to what works.
So if you have tried it all, or if you really don’t want to then Social Media integration could well be the answer to your social media prayers. We are always happy to speak to business owners, key stakeholders and the big bosses about how this approach can be a game changer.
It works best in businesses with venues of any size. From single venues, medium sized operations with a handful of sites or even larger businesses with venues in cities all over the UK. It can suit businesses with small teams or large, those considering a dedicated role or even those who already have them, but need them to be more effective.
Think of Social Media Integration as an investment into future proofing your business. It supports growth ,should that be on the table, and it gives you long lasting stabilisation with tools and resources that can be felt for years to come.
Well now you know our story, we want to know yours. Get in touch with us to chat about how Social Media Integration can benefit your business and how it can work in your operation.
Ready to see how social media integration can be a total game-changer for your business? Just fill in the form and we can chin wag about working together to make your social media make sense again.