The Importance of Brand Storytelling on Social Media with Meg Coffey

Meg is a strategist 2.0, and Coffey and Tea is just one of the four activities that she runs.

Coffey and Tea is focused on tourism and hospitality clients, and together with her team, Meg works on content creation, execution, planning, and strategy for her clients’ social media networks.

“We are lucky in Australia because we have amazing products to work with”. Meg Coffey

One of her other activities: Social Media Perth, is a knowledge sharing platform comprising a group of people who meet once a month to network and learn from industry, news articles and trends, as well as online and face to face courses. State of Social is an international conference.

Meg describes social media as an ever-moving target, which changes too fast for people to ever really be experts:

‍“They often forget the strategy side of it”.

Few words about her team

Coffey and Tea was composed of 3 people in April 2020 and that number grew to 5 during the pandemic, thanks to growth!

The team works hard but also values life and time away from the office.

‍“To be a good employer you need to leave space for your mental health, especially when you work in social media” explains Meg.

Twitter is Meg’s favorite platform, but it’s not that popular in Australia. For Meg, Twitter goes beyond LinkedIn, it is much easier to connect and contact someone specific (or unreachable) on Twitter than on LinkedIn. Twitter is the unique channel Meg uses to contact and convince personalities to speak at the conferences she organizes. But Twitter can also be a tricky platform to spend time on.

Meg has a strong point of view when it comes to “haters” and “troll comments”. In her professional opinion, the best and most healthy thing to do as a business when this happens is to simply block the perpetrators!

Content creation and distribution

Social Media is about Storytelling

Meg has found that audiences are very different depending on the social network. For example, in the travel and tourism industry, Facebook is the platform of choice for nomad travelers, Instagram is for anyone and everyone to post their vacation photos, Pinterest is for bucket list travelers and LinkedIn mainly serves corporate travelers with recommendations for work accommodation.

Meg confessed to me that to get 10K followers on Facebook organically is not possible without telling a good story and having a good offer. Good content is essential to achieve high engagement, and valuable content creates credibility.

With that, Meg mainly focuses on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, especially for her clients, as those are the platforms where most of their target audiences are.

“It’s not enough to just write a caption that’s like ‘oh, sunset by lake’, but more, “here’s a magnificent sunset, and here’s the exact destination of that sunset, using geo tags… using the tools that the platform gives us to tell the best story.” Meg Coffey

How does Coffey and Tea create content for the tourism and hospitality industries?

“UGC accounts for 80 to 90% of what we need in terms of inspiration for storytelling” says Meg when I ask about where the content and inspiration for social strategy. Customer vision, content, experiences, Instagram Stories, videos, blog content with a SEO angle… are just a few of the content formats Coffey and Tea focuses on for its clients.

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Meg doesn't do a lot of IGTV or Reels because she prefers to go through written (textual) storytelling rather than video shooting. She thinks it has more impact to have a real written story than to create content that is identical to everyone else’s.

From Meg’s perspective, creating content is about telling a story of experiences, using the right words and expressing a real emotion, and through that strategy, you sell your product or service to someone who’s seduced by the story, someone who's caught the feeling you want to associate with your brand.

What is Iconosquare’s role?

Meg tracks most of her social media metrics with Iconosquare. The Engagement section really helps her to be focused on the community’s reactions to the content. She always looks at the metrics with a holistic view, because it’s okay to lose followers, especially in the hospitality and tourism industry (possibly because once the vacation is over, there’s no more need to follow the account).

Meg regularly looks to these metrics to gauge her performance rate:

• Engagement rate
• Reach
• Impressions
  

All metrics are valuable and important for different reasons. Meg believes that the least important metric to focus on is follower number. Social media is better than classic communication because we can download down the data, and take the time to look at the impact  and potential solutions available to improve performance.

Data pulled from @state_of_social

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Which tools does Meg Coffey use?

• Iconosquare (for the analytics)
• Buffer (for the scheduler)
• Zapier (for automation)
• Canva (for creation)
• Adobe suite

Our questions to the Social Media Manager:

Q: What takes up the most of your time as a social media professional?

A: “Doomscrolling... where you sit there and scroll for hours, sourcing content, finding the right stuff to share, spending time on platforms”

Q: What’s your favorite account on social media?

A: “@wherehenrygoes he is my 35 kg labradoodle. I follow many great accounts, I don't have a favorite one…”

Q: Would you say you have a mantra? Or anything else who helps you with productivity?

A: “With productivity, no… because I'm the queen of procrastination! But I do have a mantra as far as what we do that I often tell my staff: “be transparent, be authentic, be yourself. You want to do business with honest people”.

Q: What would your ultimate advice to a community manager be?

A: “When it comes to being a good community manager, and looking after your brand, make sure you know what your company stands for.  You understand the ins and outs, and then you know how to tell your story. Engage with people, talk to them! It’s social media! If people don't want to play by the rules, block them! It’s 100% your playground, you get to decide what happens.”

“Have fun. I think we need to go back to having a little bit of fun with social media, it doesn’t need to all be doom and gloom...” Meg Coffey