By Luc Wade, Marketing Director at Hive Business

Wetherspoon chairman Tim Martin is a gifted businessman, so when he does something like scrap the pub chain’s social media accounts and media pundits everywhere say it will backfire, you have to wonder.

Martin has form. In 2002 he distributed 500,000 beer mats across his pubs, urging Britain not to join the euro. Then he campaigned hard for Brexit, while pretty much all other high profile figures of the same persuasion cringed.

These were more than publicity stunts, they were an outcome of his ability to look at a problem with an independent mindset and think for himself. It takes courage to articulate a different reality to the one everyone else is subscribing to, but it’s a prerequisite of real leadership, perhaps the most important single thing an effective leader does.

Wetherspoon has nearly 1,000 outlets but had just 44,000 Twitter and 100,000 Facebook followers, which told Martin something about his customers: they don’t care. The average Spoons tweet in 2018 got just six retweets and four likes for no discernible return.

Martin said: “We were concerned that pub managers were being side-tracked from the real job of serving customers,” and in a final tweet he added: “I don’t believe that closing these accounts will affect our business whatsoever, and this is the overwhelming view of our pub managers.”

The man certainly knows his customers — he pays surprise visits to up to 14 pubs a week, parking half a mile away to walk in so he can observe their location and take notes on the experience. He’s concerned with human psychology and tells his staff they don’t have to smile while on duty because their natural personality will come out if they’re not put under pressure.

Most public-facing businesses slavishly post on social media and expect staff to smile without the slightest thought of the outcome. Martin’s approach is more careful: bother to investigate the business outcome of an activity, however conventional it is, and keep an open mind.

He responded to GDPR requirements in the same way, saying “let’s delete our data, we don’t need it”. You can do this kind of thing when you have a deep philosophical coherence around what your brand is and who your customers are — his customers are no-nonsense drinkers in the real world who want a break, and to engage them in the real world he has enormous high street presence and the Wetherspoon News magazine.

For other brands who don’t have that presence, social media might be a way to reach a new audience, but the details should be interrogated Martin-style. If your practice is devoting resources to regular social posts, do you know why and are you happy with the return?

If you are merely posting to your followers, who are mostly your staff, family and friends, what is the point? Why not shift your budget to targeted video and image social ads to reach a new audience, one that you can define as it suits you, then run a series of test ads to hone your content? There has to be more return that way, because even if you don’t break even first time around you will uncover valuable ad performance insights that you can apply to the next campaign.

If you need help analysing your business or making decisions, call 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.