Social media has given marketers something previous generations could only dream about.
Immediate feedback.
Publish something and within minutes you can see views, engagement, clicks and comments.
Run an ad and you can start seeing conversions.
That's incredibly powerful.
It may also be making us a little impatient.
Measurable doesn't always mean immediate
Because we can see performance quickly, there's a temptation to expect every activity to justify itself immediately.
Sometimes that's entirely appropriate.
If you're running a conversion campaign, you need to understand whether it's converting.
But not everything social does for a brand happens in the 24 hours after somebody sees a post.
Recognition takes time.
Trust takes time.
Community definitely takes time.
What happens when everything needs an immediate return?
If every creative decision is judged primarily by immediate clicks or conversions, brands naturally start producing more direct-response content.
That might improve one metric.
It can also make the entire social presence incredibly boring.
Marketing has always had to balance creating future demand with capturing the demand that already exists.
Social isn't exempt from that just because the dashboards update faster.
Long-term doesn't mean unaccountable
This is where the conversation needs some nuance.
We're not arguing that marketers should publish content for twelve months, ignore the results and call it “brand building”.
There should still be evidence that things are moving in the right direction.
Are more of the right people discovering the brand?
Are people spending time with the content?
Are they returning?
Are they searching for the brand?
Is the community becoming stronger?
Is that attention eventually translating into something commercially valuable?
Those are questions worth asking.
Shaka in practice
Our work with Time + Tide shows how a long-term strategy that reflects what the brand needs really pays off in the long-run.
They already had a loyal readership, a respected editorial voice, and a growing profile in the watch world, but their ambitions were expanding far beyond traditional watch journalism.
They needed a strategy that wasn’t focused on quick clicks. They needed a long-term plan to align their socials with where their brand was headed - physical spaces, and a new era of luxury watches.
We’ve worked with them over years, and with their bases in London, New York and Melbourne to make sure their online presence grew with them, and felt truly authentic to the brand’s ambitions, their audiences, and the wider culture in the watch scene.
In the first 24 months, Time+Tide Watches organically grew by 150,000+ followers, driven not by trends, but by credibility and consistency.
On Instagram alone, the brand now reaches 20 million+ organic views every month.
Beyond the stats, Time + Tide have become a trusted cultural hub for modern watchmaking - something their growing community continue to engage with today.
Delivery vs purpose
This is something we've been thinking about a lot at Shaka.
There's a natural tension between delivering the numbers that matter today and building something that creates value tomorrow.
We don't think brands should have to choose one.
Great social should be commercially accountable.
It should also build recognition, relevance and relationships that don't neatly fit into a 30-day attribution window.
The interesting part is working out how those things support each other.
Social gives us an incredible ability to understand what is happening right now.
We just shouldn't let that make us forget about what we're trying to build next.
