Social media marketing has come a long way from simple Facebook posts and static content. Nowadays, marketers are exploring two distinct forms of social communication: archived and ephemeral communication, and how to vary their marketing message accordingly.

What is ephemeral content, you ask? Today on the Digital Marketing Professor Series brought to you by Marketscale, we sat down with Lane Wakefield, Ph.D, Assistant Professor of Sports Marketing & Analytics at Mercer University, to define ephemeral content and explore the five distinct goals of this form of social media marketing.

“In ephemeral content, brands and marketers can be more relational and think about how to make a friend and not how to look good for the other thousands of people that are going to read this,” Wakefield said.

These five goals — basically the social post’s purpose — help us understand and focus our marketing efforts toward creating content that feels germane to the social platform; that makes for better digital content all around.