If you work in marketing or communications, you’ve probably seen the series “Mad Men.” If not, I recommend it, the action takes place in the mid-1960s, when in New York some of today’s global advertising agencies were being born, against a very interesting business backdrop. Some would say that’s when the science of marketing truly began to develop, as a response to the increasingly competitive environment businesses were facing at the time. Sure, more than 60 years ago the media landscape looked very different, though parts of it are still with us today. Even so, in that period, real marketing could only be done by those who could afford to pay colossal sums for exposure on TV, in the magazines and newspapers of the day, on radio, or on billboards.
A new era of marketing and communications began, cautiously, with the democratization of the internet in the early 2000s, mainly because any business, no matter how small, could now be found online. Looking back, we realize that in Romania we were slightly out of sync with these trends. In the 1960s there could be no talk of any form of marketing other than communist propaganda, and around the 2000s we were only just starting to have the first successful TV ads. From the 2010s onward, however, the new era of marketing was further boosted by two new forces: social media coupled with online transactions. From there, competition became even more aggressive, with the barrier to entry brought very low by these two elements. We also began to align, gradually, with global trends in Romania, thanks as well to the good internet speeds we enjoy nationwide. From the appearance of social networks to today, the first AI algorithms have been refined through interaction with vast masses of people. Until around 2020, their influence on people’s decisions wasn’t really taken seriously, but today, in 2025, especially in Romania after last year’s annulled elections, we realize how tremendous the power of these algorithms is. Although people now talk about artificial general intelligence (AGI), our society still hasn’t quite figured out how to manage today’s social-network algorithms, which themselves are a form of artificial intelligence. In this article, I will try to analyze the impact these social-network algorithms have, especially on small and medium-sized businesses in Romania, in an attempt to help entrepreneurs understand the phenomenon so they can adapt to the new realities.
First, to understand the phenomenon from the entrepreneur’s perspective, we have to start with the element these social networks possess, also called their competitive advantage. That element can be simply named: attention. All consumers are people who probably have around 16 hours of daily activity, assuming they spend the other 8 resting. Of those 16 hours, for adults, probably 8 are spent at work or school (in the best case), and the remaining 8 doing various activities. Out of these 16 hours, many of us spend a portion on social media, hours during which our attention is focused on those apps. If you use iOS (Android likely has a similar function), somewhere in Settings there is a Screen Time section that shows the time spent in each app, by day or by week. Your attention directed toward those apps can range from a few minutes a day to several good hours. The more hours you spend on social media, the higher the revenues of the companies that own those apps.
We can go further and say that social networks offer entrepreneurs access to consumers’ attention. I wouldn’t like to discuss here and now the moral nuances of these communication products, clearly they can be harmful for some consumers, but unfortunately boycotting them or not using them can carry a cost that’s hard to estimate for any business. Next, what can you do with consumers’ attention? Obviously a rhetorical question. Since ancient times, from the first merchants, the attention given by the consumer to the seller has been the precursor to any transaction, that’s why merchants sought to build markets where people would come and discover products; that’s why later the locations of street shops began to be dictated by foot traffic; that’s why billboards appeared on busy arteries, radio ads, or TV ads priced higher on stations with bigger audiences. A product or service you’ve never heard of or seen simply cannot make it onto your shopping list. Going forward, the way this consumer attention is managed by today’s various social networks falls under the influence of the algorithms mentioned above.
The question I will try to answer as simply as possible is: what can the entrepreneur running an SME do in this attention economy to succeed?
The first thing to do is to clearly define the business need and then translate it into expected results measured either by these social networks or directly by the business using various indicators. A situation I often encountered with certain entrepreneurs who came to our agency for social-media services had to do with their expectations of communication on social networks. Some time ago, people would simply come and ask us to handle their social-media communication, expecting their sales to double after a month. There’s no such thing, or at least we haven’t reached the level where we can deliver that.
The situation is much more complex and must be viewed as a whole. If we are talking about a business that is new to social media, its primary communication need is to build awareness, so the market finds out about it. How do you measure that in social media? Through the reach of your posts, through views, through the interactions consumers have with the content you post. Will this help you grow sales in the first month or the first year? Not necessarily. I’ll repeat: the situation is complex, maybe your commercial offer isn’t the most attractive on the market, or maybe the market for your products wouldn’t react to a €10 price difference anyway, or maybe you sell high-value products and people first need to trust you before making a purchase. In all the above cases, sales won’t be able to grow as long as you communicate primarily to generate awareness. What will you gain? You’ll gain a base of followers who, first of all, learn your name, learn where to find you, learn what you do, and they do all that by interacting with your content, which is very important for social-network algorithms that will remember well whom you’ve attracted with your messages. In more technical language, during this period you populate the top of the sales funnel, composed of consumers who might, at some point, become customers. To succeed with these awareness campaigns, it’s obviously not enough to communicate just your name, you need to communicate what you consider to be your competitive advantage. How you and the bright minds around you manage to translate that competitive advantage into the right messages for your audience, through creative materials, is another matter. The performance of awareness campaigns will obviously be influenced by the wow element you have to communicate; ChatGPT can help, but remember that your competitors have the same subscription.
We can further assume you already have a year of awareness campaigns on social media and a good part of potential customers recognize your brand. The next step toward boosting your sales brings tactical campaigns into the discussion, which can take various forms depending on how your sales funnel is organized. Businesses that sell products online from their own website proceed one way; businesses that only generate online leads act differently; and businesses that want to be contacted by phone proceed differently again. For these campaigns to succeed, first the algorithms need to have enough information about the people who have already interacted with your content. Of course, in paid campaigns you can set audiences, but it’s very likely that the people you have in mind as potential customers are not exactly the same as those who have already interacted with you and would actually buy. Here the algorithms might know better. Next, the topics of tactical campaigns aim for immediate sales and target the “30-day market,” i.e., potential consumers who can make a purchase in the next 30 days or plan to do so. Here, tens of thousands of views no longer weigh the same; here, a concept known in communications as the “trigger to buy” is very important. You need to find that message that can make a potential consumer decide to buy from you, and you also need to deliver it to the right consumer. For that you need a competitive commercial offer, you need a sales force that reacts promptly, and you need the support processes around the sale to run smoothly, alongside a very good specialist in communications and targeting. Otherwise, you can have the coolest communications campaign and still self-sabotage on the goal line.
Broadly speaking, communication through social networks can be divided into these two major categories. If you still have a ton of questions, that’s very good, it means you’ve understood something. From here, the process becomes even more complex, because it’s different for every business, depending on the industry, the size of the business, the budgets you have available for content production and ad placement, the rest of the advertising-channel mix you use, the timing of your market, the sums other industries invest on the same networks for the same consumer attention, and especially depending on your customers’ profiles. From a certain point, when you aspire to compete with major players in your market and the amounts invested in advertising are not small, it would be extremely beneficial to have great clarity about your communications strategy. In other words, it’s good to know what you want, but also what you can obtain with the resources you have. For that you need a competent marketing manager, and if you don’t have one, you can call us at F21 digital and ask for an opinion.
In closing, I’ll leave you with two ideas that I hope will help your decision-making:
- The algorithm doesn’t love you and it doesn’t hate you. It only cares about what keeps people in the app. Give it that, and it will reward you.
- Paid attention is expensive. Earned attention takes a lot of work. The sustainable kind is owned attention, offered by those who follow you loyally.
