Week 8: Social Platforms and Theory

Week 8 Lecture: Social Platforms and Theory

Discussion

1 Introduction & Recall

⏱ 10 min

Aims; quick poll on platform formats and cadence across Meta, X, YouTube, LinkedIn

Acquisition

2 Platforms & Theory

⏱ 30 min

Four platform environments, creative and disclosure, cadence and tone, TAM and SIP, evaluation

Practice

3 Guided Whole-Class Discussion

⏱ 15 min

Mini-case: choose one platform and message; state cadence and one TAM or SIP justification

Assessment

4 Attendance & Exit Check

⏱ 5 min

Attendance, one-minute exit check

Module Arc

Weeks 1–2

Foundations and Planning

→

Weeks 3–5

Content and Media

→

Weeks 6–8

Acquisition Channels

→

Weeks 9–12

Relationships and Measurement

→

Weeks 13–15

Governance and AI

This closes the Acquisition Channels block. Search finds people who are already looking. Social reaches people who came for something else entirely, and has to earn the attention before it earns the click.

Today’s Agenda

Six things to take into the tutorial

Why theory outlasts platform tips
TAM: ease, usefulness, trust
SIP: relationship, reply quality, time
Four platform environments
Creative and disclosure; cadence and tone
Evaluation: reach, engagement quality, click or conversion

The artefact you build

A one-week social plan, six fields per post:

Platform
Format
Message
Asset
Cadence
Primary metric

Plus two paragraphs of rationale, one per theory.

Why Two Theories Beat One Checklist

Formats change. The feed algorithm is rewritten. Last year’s advice about optimal posting times becomes this year’s superstition.

Theory ages better. It describes the person, and people change more slowly than interfaces.

The Technology Acceptance Model

Adoption is driven by two beliefs: perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use (Davis, F. D., 1989). Commercial settings add a third: trust.

Read all three as barriers standing between your post and the action you want.

Three Barriers, One Diagnosis

Figure 1

Ease shapes usefulness, as in Davis’s original model. All three converge on intention before an action follows: identify the belief that is actually weak before choosing the creative.

Walk the diagram left to right. The post is on the left, the action you want is on the right, and the model runs through three beliefs on the way.

This is Davis’s actual causal shape, not three independent checkboxes: ease also shapes usefulness directly, exactly as it does in the original model, and all three beliefs converge on the same intention before an action follows.

Here is the diagnostic discipline: a campaign whose real problem is trust will waste its entire budget simplifying a checkout that already works fine. That team will report that they optimised the funnel and conversion barely moved, and they will conclude that social media fails for their category. They diagnosed the wrong belief.

Ask the class: for a product nobody has heard of, which belief is usually weak? Usually trust. For a product everyone trusts but few can be bothered with? Ease.

[Timing: 2 minutes]

Ease: Count the Decisions

Ease is the friction between the thumb and the outcome.

A post asking someone to visit a website, find the shop page, choose a variant, and register an account is asking for four decisions. Each one loses people.

When Reefkind moved its stockist list from a PDF link to a native map inside the post caption, the same creative and the same audience produced more shop visits. Two steps had disappeared.

Usefulness: Worth the Attention It Costs

A photograph of a sunscreen tube is a product shot.

A ninety-second clip explaining which UV filters bleach coral, and which leave it alone, is useful to a diver who buys nothing at all.

The second one earns saves, gets sent to a dive buddy, and is still working in six months.

Trust: The Barrier Evidence Solves

“Reef-safe” is a claim anyone can print.

What turns it into something a buyer will risk money on:

A named lab test, dated, from an accredited testing house
A visible ingredient list, readable on screen
A dive centre willing to be quoted and identified

Social Information Processing

Early theorists predicted online relationships would stay shallow, because text strips out tone, expression, and posture. They were wrong.

Walther showed relationships reach comparable depth online, given one extra ingredient: time (Walther, J. B., 1992).

Three Consequences for a Brand Account

Relationship accumulates. Six months of consistent presence is an asset a better-funded competitor will need six months to match.

Reply quality carries disproportionate weight. A comment answered in one specific, informative sentence does more relational work than three scheduled posts.

Time is the input the theory insists on. Cadence matters less as a number than as a signal of continued presence.

What This Means for Your Budget

The most common social media budget error: spending everything on production and nothing on the hours after publication.

Reefkind’s plan reserves twenty minutes a day for replies.

A diver asking “does this work under a 3mm wetsuit?” is a Conviction-stage buyer, and answering well in public answers it for everyone who reads the thread later.

Four Platform Environments

Each platform has a dominant format, a cadence expectation, and a tone. Those three together decide whether your creative fits, or reads as an import from somewhere else.

Meta · X · YouTube · LinkedIn

Cadence and Tone: The Map

Figure 2

The Four, Briefly

Meta (Facebook and Instagram) · broadest reach in this market, most format-flexible: feed, carousel, Stories, Reels. Facebook groups reach local trade.

X · fast, text-led, reactive. Post copy runs to 280 characters; threads extend a claim.

YouTube · where the long explanation lives, plus Shorts for discovery. Search-driven, so a good video keeps earning views for months.

LinkedIn · reaches the trade: procurement managers, dive centre owners, distributors.

Creative and Disclosure Basics

Two disclosure obligations apply to the work you plan this week, and the platforms enforce both.

Paid partnership · Advertising claims

Disclosure: Two Obligations

Paid partnership disclosure

When a creator posts about your brand for payment, free product, or any other consideration, the post must be labelled. Meta and Instagram have a branded content tag; X and YouTube have equivalents; #ad is the written convention.

Placed where a reader sees it without expanding the caption. Buried at the end of a hashtag block satisfies nobody, and platforms increasingly detect and demote it.

Advertising disclosure

A promoted post carries a platform-applied label. Your obligation is in the creative: claims in a paid post are advertising claims, and the evidence has to exist before the post runs.

Two Creative Rules from the Environment

Design for sound-off. Most feed video is watched muted, so burned-in captions carry the argument.

Design for the crop. A 16:9 asset placed in a 9:16 Story loses a third of its frame. The claim belongs in the middle.

Both rules come from how the platform is actually used, and both are checked in your tutorial submission.

Evaluation: Three Lenses

Reach · how many distinct people saw it.

Engagement quality · what the reaction cost the viewer.

Click or conversion · traffic that arrived, and what it did next.

Follower count belongs to none of the three.

Engagement Quality: What Did It Cost?

Figure 3

Worked Example: Reefkind

A Maldivian reef-safe mineral sunscreen brand. Two segments: visiting divers and snorkellers who buy on the island, and dive centres that stock retail.

Canvas position: Knowledge-to-Preference transition. Blocking barrier: trust.

Reefkind’s One-Week Plan

Figure 4

Primary metric: saves on the ingredient Reel. Reach is diagnostic; LinkedIn enquiries are the trade outcome.

Walk the week. Monday’s Reel reads the ingredient list beside a dated lab certificate. Tuesday’s X thread is the filter chemistry argument, which runs past 280 characters so it becomes a thread with the claim complete in the first post. Thursday’s carousel compares four filters with sources on the final card. Friday’s LinkedIn post is the trade case note. Saturday’s Stories name the three islands with stockists.

Point at the gaps. They are deliberate. Each post has a staffed reply window before the next one publishes.

The primary metric choice is worth explaining: saves, because a visitor makes the actual purchase later, in a shop, without the phone in hand. A save is the signal that maps to that behaviour. Click-through would be the wrong primary metric for a product bought offline.

[Timing: 2 minutes 30 seconds]

The Rationale, in Theory Terms

TAM. The campaign attacks the trust belief with third-party evidence: a dated lab certificate, a readable ingredient list, a named dive centre. Ease is handled as a landing-page fix that never has to carry the campaign.

SIP. The campaign invests in reply speed because relational depth accumulates through exchange over time, and no single well-funded asset shortcuts it.

Notice what this avoids saying: that the content is engaging or high quality. It names a mechanism and commits to an observable consequence.

Guided Discussion: The Mini-Case

Fifteen minutes, whole class.

Choose one platform and one message. State your cadence, and give one TAM or SIP justification for it.

Mini-Case: Work It Through

The situation. A Malé café roastery sells bags of locally roasted beans. It has 800 Instagram followers, one part-time person on social, and a claim that its beans are roasted the same week they are sold.

Which barrier is blocking? Ease, usefulness, or trust. Defend it in one sentence.
One platform, one message. Name both.
Cadence. How often, and can one part-time person staff the replies?
The justification. One sentence citing TAM or SIP by name.

The AI Protocol for Week 8

AI helps with two parts of this week’s work, and should stay out of a third.

AI: Permitted and Prohibited

Use AI for this	Keep AI out of this
Pressure-testing your rationale: ask it to flag any sentence asserting quality without naming a mechanism	Inventing testimonials, quotes, or named partners
Generating caption variants once message and format are fixed	Reporting engagement benchmarks with no documented source
Suggesting reply wording for a difficult comment, which you then rewrite	Describing what a competitor’s live ads currently say
Checking a plan for cadence you can actually staff	Producing the lab evidence your trust claim depends on

Prompt log requirement: at least two prompts, with the output received and the change you made. A pack with AI-assisted captions and no log is returned for resubmission.

Exit Check

One minute. Write one theory-anchored action you will try next week.

The form: name the theory, name the action, name what you expect to observe.

Worked example: “SIP. I will answer every comment within one hour on posting day for two weeks. I expect the number of replies carrying a question to rise, because earlier answers show the account is worth asking.”

References

Davis, F. D. (1989). Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology. MIS Quarterly.

Walther, J. B. (1992). Interpersonal effects in computer-mediated interaction: A relational perspective. Communication Research.