A well-crafted strategy serves as the blueprint for how brands connect with their audiences, drive conversations, and ultimately achieve their business objectives. Without a clear plan, social media efforts can become disjointed, aimless, and inefficient, leading to wasted resources and missed opportunities. Viren Sean Noronha, Co-founder, The New Thing, deconstructed the conventional wisdom that often complicates social media planning, advocating for a paradigm shift towards simplicity and practical clarity. 

He challenged the industry’s reliance on intricate strategic models and data-heavy approaches, proposing a more straightforward and user-centric methodology that aligns closely with the actual dynamics of social media platforms and content creation.

Noronha’s approach was rooted in the belief that social media strategy should be accessible and actionable, focusing on essential, fundamental questions rather than getting lost in elaborate constructs. His emphasis on realigning strategy with the basic principles of audience engagement and content effectiveness offered a fresh perspective, pushing for strategies that are intuitive and directly tied to the platform’s core functionalities and user behaviours. This new approach not only seeks to simplify the strategic process but also aims to make it more relevant and effective.

Dissecting the social strategy myth

“Strategy as we know it is dead,” opened Noronha with this assertion, challenging the prevailing approach to social media strategy. According to him, the traditional, academically rigorous approach—replete with data analytics, psychographics, and complex frameworks—is often more a hindrance than a help. Instead, he advocated for a more intuitive, user-centric perspective.

“Approach strategy like someone who genuinely enjoys social media and uses platforms like Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube.” This shift from an analytical to a creator’s mindset, he argued, simplifies the process and makes it more effective.

Noronha’s key points on the pitfalls of current strategy practices were:

• The ‘strategist’ is an outdated designation in agencies.

• No one needs to know what they already know about their brand.

• The strat and creative team combine decks, 2 hours before the pitch.

• A strat deck takes 2x the bandwidth you could have spent creating, posting and learning.

• You will NEVER go back to that strat deck after locking it.

Critiquing the typical process, he said, “You bring in a new client, prepare to create content, and suddenly, top management demands a strategy deck. This results in a week spent assembling a strategy and another week crafting a 45-55-slide deck. Meetings are delayed, and you feel like you’re pitching for the client all over again, and if you bomb it then again, you spend a week and the cycle repeats often ending in burnout.” This convoluted process, he argued, leads to minimal actual content creation and misaligned goals.

Social Strategy is pretentious; what it needs to be is simple.

Noronha asked agencies not to fall into the trap of believing that complexity equates to better strategy. He pointed out that there is a human tendency to add more elements when something doesn’t make sense or is unconvincing, rather than simplifying or refining it. He emphasised that this approach is misguided and counterproductive.

He distilled social media strategy into four essential questions:

1. What are you trying to accomplish?

2. Who are you trying to reach?

3. What resources do you have?

4. How will you measure success?

He said, “If you answer the first one, the fourth one is a very obvious answer. If you have a clear understanding of the second one, your content strategy is already in place. If you have a firm grasp of the third one and you’re able to sort of present that to your clients or brand or team, whether you’re an internal team or whether you’re an agency pitching to a brand, you will have a clear understanding of how you’re going to go about achieving goal number one.”