Social Media is the wild west. Some new services rise quickly and folks will flock; some to sell access (pickaxes) and some to sell services (mining companies).

Gary V. of VaynerMedia recently dropped a nugget: TikTok is the next big thing’ (to him). This caused quite the ruckus on Reddit as anecdotal stories poured in by the handful about efficacy of Google, Instagram, and Facebook advertisements in lieu of TikTok (and SnapChat, as Gary has previously recommended). Much of the Reddit community feels as though TikTok is not the play for the vast majority of people, and they might be right. Life is about nuance; and talking heads like Gary rarely get the time to expound fully on the nuance of their opinion.

So, what’s the deal? It’s just the Pareto Principle at play. Roughly 80% of your social media advertising results will come from 20% of your efforts. It is up to you to figure out what that 20% is.

The responsible and measured approach to this would be something like follows:

  1. Determine total amount of adspend available to use
  2. Spread adspend evenly over varied platforms (Youtube, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pandora, etc)
  3. Note the results, run another month of tests with new adsets and calls to action across all platforms
  4. Note the results again. Take your best 20% of the platforms and your best adsets and run with those! For some businesses, this will be just TikTok. For others, it’ll be Facebook, Snapchat, and Google!

For others, like Gary V, it’s Instagram and LinkedIn. The moral of the story is short and sweet: don’t focus on what the person in the lane next to you is doing, keep your eyes on the road and press down on the accelerator, hard, when you catch wind that you are onto something.

-cs