How to apply the Moneyball technique to social media
I’m a huge sports fan, more specifically team sports. Hockey and soccer are my favorite.
This is also why I love sports movies: boxing, football, baseball, etc. I deeply enjoy the real and touching stories they tell. I find there are some big similarities between sports and entrepreneurship: boldness, tenacity, perseverance, resilience… One must never quit when faced with adversity in order to achieve the ultimate goal.
One of my favorite sports movies is Moneyball, released in 2011, featuring the beautiful Brad Pitt.
The movie tells the story of Billy Beane, the general manager for the Oakland Athletics. His baseball team evolves in a small market and fights against teams that have virtually unlimited budgets. A true David versus Golitah type of deal.
In 2002, Billy applied the rules created by a mathematician named Bill James, which completely deconstructed the established player-evaluation rules, directing attention towards more efficient players. This technique allowed Billy to fly under the radar of all the other teams still evaluating players with the good old method. Clever you say? Heck yes!
What’s the Good ol’ method?
“ He hits a lot of home runs, he steals bases, he attracts crowds.” All those criterias were applied by old teams so they could use their millions to sign players.
That being said, is it better to have one guy worth 8 millions that hits 1 point home runs, or to have 5 guys for the same price who hit singles or doubles that are worth 3 or 4 points? Of course, you have more chances to win the game with 4 points than 1. That’s just logic, right?
Ok, but what’s the link with social media?
For a few months now, I’ve been working with the MOBUX team to develop this strategy for our clients. Here, I will be explaining how all of this falls into place.
The vast majority of our clients here at MOBUX are Oakland A’s fighting against the Yankees and Red Sox of this world.
A neighborhood restaurant that fights against giants like St-Hubert, Cage aux Sports and McDonald’s can’t really start comparing its financial and marketing resources if it wants to get more visibility and reach more clientele.
Those big businesses have multi-million budgets, full-time marketing teams and well-built strategies that span out through the whole year. For small business owners like yourself, your marketing team basically amounts to one person: you. Your budget is based on “what you can afford for the month”, and your strategy usually resembles “well, seems like I haven’t posted anything to social media in a while.”
There is no way you can beat the giants if you keep playing by their rules, which is why you must use the Moneyball rulebook.
Build an efficient action plan
Before taking any action on social media, make sure you answered the following questions:
Which platforms should I use?
Who am I trying to reach through those platforms? (my personas)
What is my competition doing?
What are the pillars of my content?
What are the important industry-related annual events?
What is my yearly budget for all this?
You can read those two articles that will help you build your action plan:
Stop trying to hit a home run
A home run is definitely spectacular… but it’s very costly and if you swing and miss, you just paid a lot for no result whatsoever.
What’s a home run on social media? It can be a viral video, web clips that are doing exceptionally well, a massively shared blog post or any other social media related publication.
When building an action plan, you must establish an “operations budget” to create content, videos, photos, blog posts, etc. Your objective is to create the most relevant content possible at the lowest cost.
If you have a 10 000$ annual budget and you decide to sink 6000$ into a corporate video… you’re reaching for the home run. If your video turns out to be a bust, you just blew 60% of your budget.
A better idea would be to invest that 6000$ to produce several videos, from which you isolate the text and create blog posts. While producing that, you make sure to take pictures and document everything in order to feed your social media.
That way, rather than getting one potential home run, you get several potential singles. What makes social media so great is that you can never completely know how your audience will react to your content… And believe me, you’d much rather have a single becoming a home run than the opposite.
Analyze your stats
As a good team manager, you should always review your stats. After a series of victories or defeats, it is essential to take a step back and analyze what could be improved. Then, it becomes quite interesting to observe some of your publications and to ask the following questions:
Is my publication a strikeout, a single, a double, or a home run?
What could I modify to improve my publication’s performance?
To help you classify your publications, here is a little Moneyball style lexicon:
Strikeout:
The publication did not generate any impact.
Foul ball:
It performed well for the first few minutes, but then died down quickly. Basically, a false joy.
Single:
Well performing publication (good reactions and comments)
Double:
Publication performance that exceeds expectations (reactions, comments and shares)
Triple:
Publication that performs very well. (lots of reactions, comments, shares and visible interest coming from potential clients)
Home run:
Viral content. People recognize you on the street and ask for your autograph (yes, you’ve heard me right, your autograph!)
Keep an eye on the free agent market
Even if you’re managing a team, you should always be aware of what’s going on in the free agent market as well as what the other teams are doing.
Here is what you should be doing concretely to stay aware from week to week:
Observe your competition and identify what they are doing well, but mostly what they are doing wrong. A badly orchestrated publication from a competitor can help you create something beautiful and efficient.
Look at what your clients and influencers are doing on social media. For example: a celebrity visited your restaurant and posted a picture on Instagram. Guaranteed single.
Be aware of current events and try to see how you can use them to your advantage. Examples such as the #10yearchallenge, the Gad Elmaleh scandal, the new canadian food guide… All of those current topics are guaranteed singles, but also potential home runs.
To put it bluntly: stop chasing the home run! Think long term and aim for the playoffs.
I’m closing this by citing Peter Brand from Moneyball:
“ Your goal is not to buy players. Your goal is to buy wins. To buy wins, you need guys that make it to the bases.” So, you need a lot of singles.
Now, if you adapt this to social media, it would go like this: (now I’m citing myself!)
“ Your goal is not to create a viral video. Your goal is to generate more customers. To get more customers, you need more publications that perform well.” So, you need a lot of singles.
It’s that simple!
For more info marco@agencemobux.com