What Is Social-First Content?

Social-first is one of those phrases the marketing industry uses constantly without always explaining what it means.

For us, it's actually pretty simple.

The content was conceived for social from the beginning.

Not a television advert cropped vertically.

Not a campaign key visual with animated text over it.

Not something created for another channel that happens to have been uploaded to Instagram.

The idea starts with social.

Start with how people actually use the platform

Nobody opens TikTok because they're hoping to find some advertising.

People don't scroll Instagram because they're excited to see your campaign rollout.

Your brand is competing with friends, creators, publishers, entertainment, memes and everything else the platform thinks that person might enjoy.

That changes how you need to approach creative.

Social-first work thinks about the opening second. The format. The pace. The sound. The comments. The context surrounding the content.

It understands where it's going to live before somebody presses record.

Social-first doesn't mean low production value

This is an important distinction.

Sometimes brands hear “native content” and assume we mean somebody filming something badly on their phone.

We don't.

Highly produced work can absolutely be social-first.

Equally, something shot on an iPhone can be terrible social content.

The question isn't how expensive the camera was.

It's whether the idea understands the environment in which somebody is going to experience it.

Your brand still needs to exist

There's another extreme where brands become so desperate to behave like creators that they lose any sense of who they are.

Jumping on every trending sound isn't a strategy.

The interesting bit is finding the space where something feels native to the platform while still being unmistakably yours.

That's much harder.

And much more valuable.

Shaka in practice

Our work with Skyscanner is a great example of how important it is to consider the way a platform is actually used, and that building the content out around that can unlock some seriously brilliant outcomes. 

For Skyscanner, we looked to TikTok. We did a deep dive into the travel content that doesn't work on the platform - then did the opposite in a way that aligned with their brand. 

This led us to a strategy of unbiased travel tips, news and education balanced with entertainment at a scale that felt tiktok-native. 

And with 95,000 followers gained, it proves that sticking to your guns and creating content that feels natural to both platform and brand really works. 

Start somewhere different

A lot of social briefs effectively begin:

“We've created this. How do we put it on social?”

We'd rather start with:

“What would this idea look like if social was where it began?”

That small change in thinking can result in completely different work.