Secrets to a successful social media strategy for SME’s

Why are people so drawn to social media?

I’m sure many of most of us in business have been fascinated or wonder, what kind of interactions does the online world provide all of us that cannot most of us cannot undertake offline.

Remember most people used to have friends without facebook, twitter and the rest of the social media platforms.

Remember the real world comes with certain social norms of conduct that keep people from saying what they really want to say, or acting how they really want to act.

Enter social media platforms which let us bend those rules. A perfect example is an unacceptable behavior in the offline world might be perfectly acceptable in the online world.

Let’s look at some practical examples

It was corporate norm that employees should not be seen openly advertising themselves on the job market until Linkedin entered the fray.

The business-oriented social network has more than 300 million members, all of whom list their educational and professional achievements on the site in the name of professional networking. It is a fact that recruiters examine these CVs for potential job candidates.

LinkedIn therefore bypasses the corporate norm of open job hunting. Your boss probably knows there is probability of you getting hired through the network but lets you stay on the site cognizant of the fact that it is also helping in improving your professional image hence the company.

Facebook helps us overcome the norm against being nosy.It does so by letting us look at profiles of others, without actually letting these people know that their content was viewed.

With a better understanding of why we love social media platforms so much we can learn how companies that sell products and services could use them to generate profit.

 Companies adopt two different approaches.

1-Digital strategy on social platforms-This strategy uses social media to broadcast commercial messages and seek customer feedback. This strategy is employed by most companies by paying social media companies to drive traffic to their pages or have more followers etc. Such a strategy can be deployed successfully to certain organizations only. Eg companies with already established brand, organizations in certain sectors etc

2-Social strategy on social platforms-This strategy steers clear of direct broadcasting in favor of helping customers create and strengthen relationships with each other. These relationships are in exchange for the customers doing various tasks for the company for free. This strategy has been adopted successfully by many organizations such as ebay, YELP etc.

Digital strategy is no different from what companies have done on other media, companies simply take this approach and put it on social media platforms.

The problem is that this approach does not work well. Most firms can’t generate the requisite engagement, and those that do often fail to convert it into sales. This is because people use social platforms to interact with their friends, and firms are seen as intruders who interrupt the experience.

In contrast, A Social Strategy says don’t just broadcast to people, arrange interactions between them, too. And once the company facilitates these interactions, it can go back to those who it helped and say, “Now we want you to do something for us.” This quid pro quo is at the core of an effective social strategy.

Simply put. Think what happens in the offline world when you introduce two people to each other, or you mend a relationship between two of your friends. You get social credits with them, such that when you go and ask them for a favor later, they will do what you ask them to. And they will do it fast.

Start-ups can also employ social strategy. Yelp, which posts consumer-written reviews of local businesses, rewards its most prolific contributors with the ability to meet other prolific contributors at face-to-face gatherings—something that many of them treasure. In return, the contributors are motivated to generate even more content for Yelp for free.

The trick is to create a strategy that simultaneously benefits both the company and the customers’ social interactions.

Without such tight integration between the benefits for customer and company, a social strategy is bound to fail.

Specifically, when the task merely solves the social failure but does not benefit the company, individuals will undertake the task, but it will not have any effect on corporate performance.

In contrast, when the task benefits the company but does not help the individuals, they will simply refuse to undertake the job, resulting in no profit increases for the company.

Getting this alignment to work is perhaps one of the most difficult parts of designing a workable social strategy.

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