TL;DR
Full Transcript
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Some of the most common questions we get when we are prospecting with people is how long does it take for social media to work?
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And that’s an interesting question because depending on your goals, that changes the timelines.
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Have you guys noticed the same thing?
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I don’t, you guys do all the work, so I just get to hear about it.
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What are you doing back in the days, back in the days of Microsoft, Jason, when you worked at Microsoft, did you remember that?
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How old was that?
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Oh, so many years ago.
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I mean, yeah, I mean, before I started Socialistics, I started an agency called Studio 9, and I’ve worked with small business owners.
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And, you know, their needs are like this, and their budgets are like this, and their expectations are like this.
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And, you know, they need things to happen right away.
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And the reality is, you know, most of these businesses, and a lot of businesses today, you know, they get it.
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Especially solopreneurs or mid-sized businesses have a need to see a return on their investment pretty quickly.
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But the fact is, it’s so competitive that it just takes time.
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I mean, these platforms like, you know, meta, Facebook, and sort of like these channels need time to test things and work things out.
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And, you know, you’re usually looking at, you know, I think, you know, at least a minimum of, you know, four to six months before you get into a rhythm.
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But a lot of businesses just don’t have that kind of patience, and that’s when we kind of get into trouble.
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And I think, in addition to that, the return on investment, well, social media, the social media landscape changes so frequently that your return on investment kind of changes too.
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It’s like, what exactly does that look like? And it’s not always measurable.
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We were just talking, we were just on a call with a client who was saying that they were taking us through their Reddit and they were saying, you know, we don’t get a ton of engagement here.
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And I think we were just talking about earlier this week how AI uses pulls a lot of information from Reddit.
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So it’s not just about, do you get engagement on that platform?
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Now it’s about, are you sending the right signals to the right platform?
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So if we’re posting content for a client on Reddit, maybe we get zero visibility or visibility that we can see.
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But when someone searches, you know, information about that client’s product in AI, it’s pulling from all the signals that we’re sending to Reddit.
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So just like that, the ROI is constantly moving to.
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Yeah. Yeah. And I think what some of the biggest culprits of misalignment here is, you know, I find that, you know, we have some of those companies out there that are, you know, looking for work and they don’t expectations set correctly.
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So all of a sudden they’re telling them, oh, 30 days, we got you, which we all know that that’s very unrealistic.
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You know, the other thing you have to is when people don’t take you through a prospecting process and go deep enough, you’re not actually figuring out what goals actually mean something to you and mean something to the bottom line of your business.
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Therefore, it’s very hard to determine how long, how long good results are going to take. And I think that those are some of the big problems that can be navigated through and kind of fixed in the, in the very beginning of that.
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But I think typically, right, what we see is in paid media, it takes a few months.
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You know, when you’re looking at something like return on ad spend, we have, I’d say, four to six months, you start seeing actual real results, you have enough of a database to look back at and say, these are things that can benchmark metrics off of.
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And now we can, we’ve done a bunch of testing leading up to this and now we actually can make smarter decisions. Do you guys notice that as well?
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Yeah, it’s either time or money. I mean, most businesses don’t have a lot.
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Like we’ve had a couple obviously experiences with clients that are, especially e-commerce clients that have large budgets and an appetite for, you know, spending a lot.
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So, you know, if you don’t, the irony of it is, if you want to move, get results more quickly, you actually, you know, throw more money at it, but most companies can’t do that.
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So, most companies have a relatively limited budget, which means that’s going to extend the amount of time it’s going to take to really see a significant ROI.
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And we just, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job of learning over time, like who works and who doesn’t work in those sorts of things.
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It’s super competitive. And, you know, I think we do a pretty good job of, you know, talking people off the ledge, but we’ve also had plenty of examples of doing that and regardless of being on the same page, you get 30, 60 days in and they’re panicking.
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Yeah, and I think that’s the red flag for me in a recent client comes to mind where, you know, they’re, one of the first things they say when they come in is, I have this set amount of money and I want to see if we can be successful.
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And that’s just immediately, you know, the wrong mindset. Like you have to be able to do a financial investment and a time investment.
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Like how much time are you willing to give this to help it grow legs.
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Because if you’re not, it’s just, it’s not going to be successful.
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And what about from the, with the organic side, I mean, typically organic also takes a little bit more of a slow burn right organic typically what we’re seeing take four to six months to start to really improve things like brand lift engagement.
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And there’s a couple of different methods and tactics we use in order to make that happen, but wouldn’t you say similar in how you think about timelines for that.
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Oh, absolutely. And there’s just so many very variables. It goes back to what I said that social media landscape is changing all the time. I don’t know if I certainly relate to this.
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I don’t know other people will relate to it as well. But if you’re, you know, you’re doing scrolling and you stop and watch a video.
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Let’s say it’s about weightlifting. And then, you know, you keep scrolling and the next 10 videos you see are almost identical to the one you just watched.
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So when you think about creating organic content for a client, you’re really trying to break through that algorithm that their customers have right so you’ve got to find create make a video that breaks through and then they’re going to see more of your content.
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Or otherwise, you’re kind of just blacklisted. You’re kind of just posting to nothing space. You really have to have a time investment there as well.
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And an experimental mindset, I’d say.
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Yeah. I mean, story storytelling is such a big piece of it as well, right? I mean, it takes a minute to craft the strategy and then craft that story. And then you see what resonates with your users and then your new users.
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And then we continue to build upon that. And that’s not something that just happens overnight.
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I think the biggest thing, like all the strategies and all the money in the world ultimately don’t matter if your product doesn’t jump off the page.
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And I think that that’s a big problem too. That’s one of the things that we try to analyze is nobody likes being told that their baby is ugly.
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So oftentimes people that are business owners or they’re really close to what they do, they maybe, you know, they can’t see past the fact that actually, you know, because when you ask questions, like, oh, well, how do you differentiate? What’s different?
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Oh, we have better prices or we have better customer service. No, those aren’t differentiators. Everybody says that does that. Like, if you have an average product, if you have something that doesn’t, you know, jump off the page on its own, then what are you doing?
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And the perfect example is my wife bought these new, I love pickles. And it’s this company called Olive My Pickle. And they’re fermented pickles.
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Now, I like pickles, but she got these things. I have one. And it was the most amazing pickle I’ve ever had in my life.
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And then all I could think about for the next week is that instead of like sugar, I’m like, what is going on here? Like, these things are amazing.
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And that’s all they think about. It’s all I want. They have this incredible product that is just everybody.
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Like, if you look at their comments, people are just going nuts over it. They have, they’ve created an amazing product. So they, I mean, that jumps off the page, that in and of itself sets them up to be successful.
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So I think that’s oftentimes a lot of the clients that we’ve experienced that have not gotten to a positive ROI and a good timeframe is because, but they’re doing isn’t that interesting.
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Yeah, I think just going back to your comment, Dave, about storytelling. I remember when I first started at Socialistics and we were probably, I mean, this is like six years ago, we’re probably coming out of this era of social media.
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But it used to be about this diverse amount of content pillars and really telling the story of the business, like a little bit through each piece of content.
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And now with like AI and kind of going back to what I was talking about before, it’s really about each post really has to be able to stand on its own because you never know what’s going to break through someone’s social media feed.
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And that could be their first introduction to your product, to your brand. And it’s really important to kind of explain it holistically, I think, and have each post be able to live on its own.
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And that’s sort of something that we’re working towards at Socialistics is making sure that the content as a whole lives in like this one strategy ecosystem, but that each piece of content really can live on its own.
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And we’re assuming it used to be that, you know, you have 10,000 followers on Facebook, you could say maybe 5,000 of them see the content that you post, but there’s just so much competition.
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The real estate is so expensive. You kind of just have to hope that you break through that one time. And you’re giving the full story in that piece of content.
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That’s an amazing point. Yeah, because that is definitely the way things are trending. It’s not so much social media anymore. It’s interest based media. So, we see a lot of a lot of content showing up in people’s feeds just because that’s what they’re interested in and that’s, that’s
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a really interesting shift we’ve seen.
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Yeah, you’ve got it. You’ve got to differentiate. Otherwise, you’re just going to get buried. Like, if you’re doing the same thing that everybody else is and if you’re not your product or service doesn’t do something unique or that that stands out.
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I mean, you’re just going to get lost in a scene of everybody.
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And I think something that I’ve noticed this might be a little bit of a tangent, but we have a client who the way that they look at their content is as if all of their followers are seeing every post and that is just not the case.
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We have to make sure, you know, we post, you know, three about this product, three about this product, three about this product. If there’s too many of one product there, you know, there’s an issue and friction, but it’s really, that’s just to look at it as if, you know, you’re seeing all the content the same way your followers are.
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It’s just not the case anymore.
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Yeah, great 100% there. You know what’s the last piece is kind of like just overall social media ROI. How long does it take just to generally see both paid and organic work together?
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And I think that in order to see paid and organic work together, we’re talking about six to 12 months. But the cool thing about that is, is that typically things that happen quickly and fast overnight, the producers, all will go away just as quickly.
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But things that have are built on a solid foundation that take a time to build tend to last forever and produce, or forever still rumored last a long time and produce, you know, hence, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
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It did not fall apart in a day. And that’s a big way. I think that people need to look at the investment in long term social.
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I wonder if I was just thinking, as you were saying that, if a better question to ask prospects is, well, first to ask, hey, do you have a marketing budget? If they don’t have a good answer to that, that’s always a red flag.
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But if they do, the real question is, what’s a marketing budget that you can spend this year that if you only broke even, you’d be fine.
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Because that’s really getting to the root of, do they have the stamina to see it through? I think too many clients haven’t expected. And some of this is agencies fault.
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And because a bunch of shitty agencies out there that give unrealistic expectations just to land the business. So that’s not helping either.
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So it’s like, how long can you spend this amount? And kind of a break even standpoint over the course of six to 12 months.
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Annual budget is so much easier to work with than, you know, here’s what we’re coming in with. We have $1,000 of ad spend that we can contribute each month.
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You know, we had a client this last year that gave us an annual budget. And then we can say, okay, we need to spend this much on photo shoots. We need this. If this is our follower KPI, then we need to spend this much on ads.
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And having the ability to look at it from that grand scale and then obviously adapt over time as things change is just immensely helpful. And it’s just indicative of the success of the.
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One of the things I think you and the service team did great with that was basically determining the points parts of the year where their business was going to have a bigger influx and then pushing bigger budgets towards that part of the year and being able to dial
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budgets back in parts of the year that it’s a little bit slower and getting that annual budget allows companies like us to do that. Yeah. Yeah. And shifting it, you know, we started the year with a professional photo shoot where the assets were incredible.
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But UGC performed better with someone in their kitchen filming themselves eating the product. So then we shifted that and said, okay, no more professional photo shoots. It’s 20 grand down the toilet.
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They have assets that they can use for their website, of course, but it’s certainly not going to hit on social media. So shifting that and just, yeah. And I think part of that is they trusted us, right? They give us the whole scope, the whole budget.
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And we get to make those determinations, which allows us more flexibility and more ability to be successful.
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Yeah. So sort of recap everything we just talked about. We’d say it’s going to be three to five months for paid return on ad spend. It’s typically four to six months for organic engagement. And then it’s six to 12 months for real brand lift.
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And I think, you know, setting yourself up with a very solid foundation, which will return tenfold as the future rolls on talking next about a couple of our actual case studies and the people we’ve worked with.
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One of the big ones here that sticks out to me taught pile bar. They’re an e-commerce brand with over 6,000 styles. They generate amazing tile. They do looks for kitchens, bathrooms, et cetera.
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We took them from 10,000 a month and spend when they started with us to 280,000 a month and spend and returned to 6x row as almost month over month and systematically grew that over 18 months.
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Now, that’s a perfect example of the crawl walk run essentially like we got in there. We figured out it took us a couple months to figure out what worked. And then once we started building through that, we were able to scale that.
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And again, that’s somebody that was a great partner and one of our favorites. You were on the service team for that Joanna. What are some of your thoughts?
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Yeah, no, it was so, so fun to work with them. And I think they were excellent collaborators as well because it’s all really now that I’m thinking about it all goes back to trust and how much you trust your agency is going to determine how successful you are because
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if you have your hands on every little piece of things and you don’t give your agency any flexibility, you’re really just tying their hands and they’re more so just like your doers like they’re just doing exactly what you want.
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But they gave us a lot of flexibility and freedom to try different things. And I think that was really vital in the success of the account.
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The only one I think that we did better than a tile bar was our fire direct, which specialized in outdoor furniture for high-end patios and stuff, particularly outdoor fire pits. We took $94,000 from them and turned that into a million dollars over six months.
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We returned basically 1,030% row as on that, which was incredible and something I know that the paid team and as well as, you know, all the leadership over here were incredibly excited and very proud of.
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But that also didn’t happen overnight either. That did take some time and just to be fully transparent, they came in with a positive row as already.
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Which is super important. I don’t think there’s there’s there’s a difference between someone who comes in completely fresh, never, never run ads and wants a positive row as with a product and a brand that no one knows anything about and says, okay, work your magic.
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With compare that to, you know, someone like Starfire that came in with a healthy ad account, meaning they had run ads in the past. They had a ton of data for us to work on.
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And basically, when we started our engagement with them, it’s one of my favorite kinds of engagements to start with where you have so much data to look into.
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And then we just get to fine tune. We get to say, okay, I see what your idea was here, but let’s shift to this. Let’s pivot with this. This audience was the most successful.
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Let’s do iterations of that. This ad type is the most successful. Let’s do iterations of that. And then our team, you know, is in this full time. So then over, you know, a month goes by, you see what’s successful and under those.
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And then you kind of branch off of that. So, yeah, just to be fully transparent, they already had a positive row as there are to be successful. We just made them more successful, which is exciting. And yeah, of course, it takes time.
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You are, I mean, bound by the learning phase of the ad platform. That’s just mandatory. But beyond that, like you, you need time to run ads.
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You need money to spend. You need to reach people in order to understand them.
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Yeah. Definitely. I think that just drives home. Your expectations should be aligned to, you know, if you’re new, or if you’ve never done these things to take longer.
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If you got things in motion and you got an established product and you’ve got success to build off of then, you know, entering into a new relationship with a qualified agency, those results are probably going to come quicker.
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Unfortunately, most people don’t automatically follow into thinking. That leads us to our last case study here today, which is 10x travel.
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This was a client that needed a lot of lead gen 10x travel is a travel program that helps people travel more and pay less money.
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We delivered 23 million impressions for them. We got 45,000 signups for them for their free online course, and we actually launched their first ever TikTok and YouTube ads, which proved to be incredibly successful.
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So what was the difference there in the sense of it’s not necessarily a product as tile bar and as well. Starfire was, but nonetheless, it was still very positive row as and lead gen.
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Well, I think this goes back to what Jason said about no one wants to hear that their baby is ugly. With 10x travel, you have this basically service, I guess you could say, that is out there.
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It’s out to save people money and get them something that they want based on what they’re already doing, right? You’re just kind of optimizing what they’re doing.
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Basically, it’s about how to, you know, what credit cards to apply for, how to spend on those to optimize like the amount of mileage you get and the way that you travel.
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So I think just to begin with, like the offering was so juicy that it was, it’s so easy to play with and to have fun with and to attract an audience.
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So when you’re asking people to spend a lot of money, for instance, Starfire Direct, those fireplaces were not cheap. That’s a difficult ask. You have to find the right audience, whereas 10x travel is a different beast like you, the offer is just so sweet.
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You just have to get the right messaging to the right people. So it’s a different challenge, but I think that’s a lot of the reason for the success is just the nature of the service.
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Yeah, well, to wrap this all up, we had tile bar, which is a six X row as we managed 280 K a month and starfire direct. We did a 10 X row as turning 95 K into about a million dollars and purchases in six months.
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And then 10 X travel, 45,000 core sign ups, three completely different goals on e-commerce sales, lead gen, but the same principles applied.
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We needed to define what winning looked like to them, set real expectations, stay consistent long enough to let the data tell us what to do next and then double down on that.
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So what do you, that’s pretty much the summary of, I think, what winning looks like and what setting real, realistic expectations and timelines look like to figure out how long it takes for social media to work.
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Not to to your horn, Dave, but I think you’re really excellent during the discovery call phase of helping people understand all of what we’ve just talked about and as it relates to them.
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I don’t expect people to listen to this and know exactly where their business fits in there in here.
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I think, especially a business owner is just too close to the situation. So that’s why we do the discovery calls kind of help you figure out what your business goals really are not just the surface level.
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Of course, you want more sales. Of course, you want more money. It’s what we all want.
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But what do you really want and how are you going to get there in a sustainable and long term way.
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Well, my horn’s been two to Joanna, so thank you. I appreciate that.
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Yeah, so to wrap this all up, I think, you know, the takeaway from this is that anything that can be built quickly can be taken away just as fast.
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Quick wins are not as valuable as something that takes time to build something that has a real foundation.
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They tend to last a lot longer, and that gets really hard to take away from you, and that’s where real ROI lives.
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So if you guys enjoyed that, stay tuned for more stuff. And then obviously, if you’re looking for social, come talk to us.
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Key Takeaways
Key Takeaways
- “How long does social media take to work?” is almost impossible to answer until you’ve defined what winning actually looks like for your business — goal clarity has to come first.
- Paid ROAS typically takes 3–5 months, organic engagement 4–6 months, and real brand lift with paid and organic working together 6–12 months.
- Agencies that promise results in 30 days are setting you up to fail — real results require real data, and data takes time to accumulate.
- Defining what winning looks like before you start is the single most important step most businesses and agencies skip entirely.
- Anything built quickly can be taken away just as fast — slow-built foundations last longer, compound over time, and are much harder to take away from you
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