Are brand accounts dead?


Does your audience care about your brand account?

Someone sent us this recently and it brings up something really important.

And we actually kinda agree, but we have a slightly different take: posting like a brand account is dead.

Compare brand accounts to creator accounts (or founder accounts, like the Reel references).

Brand accounts are usually (but not always):

  • Stuffy
  • Rigid
  • Sales-oriented
  • Not fun
  • Not entertaining
  • Bleh

Creator accounts are usually (but not always):

  • Interesting
  • Personal
  • Relatively niched
  • Intentional
  • Built to entertain/educate/inform
  • Resources

And the big thing to pull from this whole thing is that social media is still all about person-to-person connection. Honestly, brand accounts have only ever been a disruption in this communication channel. They weren’t designed for brands to participate until brands became a source of revenue generation. That’s another email for another time.

Brands kinda made a mockery of this personal connection focus with overly cynical or exaggerated conversations. This became “brand talk” and still divides social media users to this day.

What does it mean to post like a creator?

So, it’s probably important to point out that you don’t have to (and probably can’t) copy the exact same approach that creators take to building their channels. For your brand, you should be focusing on 4 things:

  • Entertaining
  • Educating
  • Telling a Story
  • Showing Your Work

Let's check back in on Generative AI

ICYMI, here’s what OpenAI has been up to lately.

video preview

It’s getting good! Just remember this: it’s only ever been an aggregation tool that can recognize and repeat patterns. And despite the fact that it can create, it’s still not a creative. If you want to make the most out of it, get good at these things:

  • Prompting: Stop us if you’ve heard this before, but if you put garbage in, you’ll get garbage out.
  • Strategy: How you use the content is going to be more important than ever. Does it matter who developed your message if your target audience never sees it?

9/8 Central

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