There was a time when a social network meant people you actually knew: clients, colleagues, suppliers, friends of friends and people who introduced you to other people because they trusted you enough to do so.
Then the internet borrowed the expression. We kept the word social, but introduced algorithms, follower counts, paid reach, dashboards and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of people explaining how to succeed on social media. Somewhere along the way, posting became confused with strategy.
Activity is easy to measure
A company can post every day and achieve very little. It can collect followers who never buy, likes from people outside its market and views from people who have forgotten the company thirty seconds later.
The useful starting point is not “Which social network should we be on?” but “What are we trying to achieve, and is social media a sensible way of achieving it?”
The audience and the objective come first. The platform comes afterwards.
Social media is rented space
Your website is yours. Your mailing list is relatively close to being yours. Your followers on a social platform belong to somebody else’s system. Platforms decide how much of your audience sees what you publish, and the rules, formats and organic reach change.
None of this makes social media useless. It simply means that it should not be confused with infrastructure you control.
Give people a reason to care
Many company feeds suffer from the same problem: they are interesting mainly to the company. A useful content strategy begins with the audience rather than the publishing calendar.
- teach something
- explain something
- demonstrate expertise
- reveal how something works
- entertain
- offer a useful opinion
- provide evidence
- help someone make a better decision
Audience is not the same as community
Follower numbers describe potential distribution. Community describes a relationship. A smaller group of people who genuinely care about the subject can be considerably more useful than a large passive audience assembled through competitions, trends or paid acquisition.
Measure what matters
Reach, followers and engagement can all be useful indicators, but they should be interpreted in relation to a real objective. Did relevant people visit the website, subscribe, enquire, buy, attend, share something useful or remember the company? The measurement should follow the objective, not the other way around.
There is also no prize for maintaining the greatest number of neglected profiles. One or two channels used intelligently are usually preferable to six accounts updated resentfully.
Social media can support a strategy
It can demonstrate expertise, build familiarity, create community, distribute useful thinking, humanise an organisation, support recruitment, provide customer service and generate enquiries. Those are strategic objectives. Social media is simply one possible means of achieving them.
The question was never really whether your business should “do social media”. It is what the business needs to achieve — and whether social media earns a place in the answer.
Have a branding problem worth solving?
Contact →