Welcome to the social media era. It was born with Web 2.0: the form of the internet that let anyone, with no budget or coding knowledge, publish content online. It led the respected American magazine TIME to name "You" its Person of the Year for 2006, and ever since, we anonymous, voiceless nobodies have had a stage, or rather many stages: Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp and Pinterest, to name only the biggest.

While private individuals, "users" in internet language, move easily from network to network, collecting and creating information, commercial companies are left confused. With so many distribution channels, where and how do you deliver marketing messages effectively? Amid all the online noise, how do we get heard and move consumers to act? We wrote the following ten commandments after two decades of working with companies and brands that we accompanied from the offline era onto the internet, in the hope that they bring some order to the chaos and give a taste of how we at MaxiMedia approach social media management with companies and brands.

  1. Choose the right social networks for your business: managing a social network is hard work even for an individual, let alone a company. So choose wisely where your brand should be present. With all due respect to Instagram's remarkable growth in recent years, a brand that doesn't produce visual content regularly will struggle to gain a foothold there. Even the old rule that Facebook is the one "must-have" network no longer necessarily holds. Recent research and data show that younger audiences no longer open Facebook accounts, so if your brand clearly targets a young audience, it may not be worth investing in.
  2. Create content as part of an overall strategy: unlike individuals, who post content organically, companies and businesses should run their social networks as part of an overall strategy. That means building a plan at the start of the year and marking the relevant peaks from the brand's offline life (sales, new collections). For each event, create content in advance, content that accompanies it, and even content documenting it afterwards. Fill the "dead" periods in the plan with online peak events, such as user activities or social-led ad campaigns, so that online and offline work together to embed the brand's messages.
  3. You're a guest in someone else's home: unlike traditional media (newspapers, TV and radio), which are the exclusive domain of professionals, social networks belong to users, and it is important to understand this. Companies may run a Facebook page or a WhatsApp service, but Facebook and WhatsApp were not originally designed for them. What does that mean? Just like guests in someone else's home, brand and company social media managers need to understand the local language, culture and rules, and behave accordingly. Here are some "house rules" worth adopting for your brand's social networks:
  4. 20 seconds is a long time, so be quick and sharp: brands certainly know how to be quick and sharp; the average TV commercial lasts about 20 seconds. But in internet time, 20 seconds is an eternity. Some theories link Instagram's sharp growth to its clear bias toward images, the fastest unit of content to consume, faster than text or video. Accordingly, we recommend investing most of the brand's social budget in visuals, with the (short) text built into them. When can you create a more complex piece of content? When the brand is creating content rather than advertising.
  5. Distinguish between advertising on social media and content for social media: like a TV news broadcast, social networks have "slots", pieces of real estate set aside for ads. If you're running a targeted social campaign, you need to create content for those slots, and then it really is advertising. Even so, in sponsored posts, and certainly in posts on your company feed, avoid advertising language. Back to rule 3: we are guests in someone else's home, and advertising is not the native language of social networks. If something in a post smells like an ad to users, chances are it will get little attention, be ignored, or be forgotten the moment they've seen it.
  6. Content is the name of the game: in light of all of the above, the companies that thrive online are those that create quality content for free. A diaper brand can create a series of videos on baby massage, or an article with tips for settling a crying baby. A pharmacy chain can create make-up tutorials. Unlike user-generated content, companies' content is made in professional studios, with good sound, ideal lighting and a tight script; and unlike content from content providers, it is free. That winning combination creates a win-win for users and companies alike, and it is the great potential of the internet.
  7. Feel the social network's heartbeat: every social network has a high pulse, some more than others. On each network where your brand has an account, you need a piece of content for every metaphorical "heartbeat": Facebook needs at least two posts a week, while Instagram already runs on a post a day. What happens if you can't keep up? Nothing. Really, nothing. Consumer response to your pages probably won't be very lively, and they'll be seen as somewhat "dormant".
  8. Likes and followers stopped being the whole story long ago: one of the most popular measures of a commercial page's success is its number of followers, and the likes or hearts on each post. But it is only a partial measure. Why? First, because companies can "buy" likes and followers, directly or indirectly. Second, because research shows that most users forget even a brand page they liked organically (not for a discount or a gift) within a few weeks. So in our view, the most important measure is engagement: how involved users are with the brand's content. It is made up of many variables, including reach, searches, comments, likes, shares and viewing content and posts to the end, and until you see engagement rise, something in your social strategy isn't quite right.
  9. Don't neglect traditional media: this rule applies more or less depending on the company and its audience, but in our view it is still relevant to everyone. Despite all the buzz around influencers (and without questioning their effectiveness), we suggest remembering the advantages of traditional media and not neglecting it. The internet tends to create "pockets" of content, or, less kindly, "ghettos": situations where the brand seems hugely popular and loved online, but this doesn't reflect real consumer behavior. Why? Because people online tend to share and consume content from people like themselves, so a brand can be very popular among a particularly noisy but actually small group of online consumers. Traditional media's reach is broader and more consistent, so it is important to nurture it too.
  10. Get users to create content for you: this is the "holy grail" of a brand's online presence: the moment users create valuable content for the brand and become independent marketing agents who voluntarily promote the values of a brand they love. Cooking enthusiasts posting photos of your mixer or chopper, or tech fans proudly showing they were first in line for the new product you launched. If engagement matters, user-generated content is the highest form of engagement. But like all good things in life, it isn't easy to achieve. Only after years of building a significant, distinctive brand presence, offline and online, can you expect it to start happening. Even so, getting users to create content for you is, in our view, the goal, and we believe every company or business, whether a huge conglomerate or a local business, should and can reach it.