Blog: Let’s go Social

Does your company maintain a social media presence and is it done for the right reasons?

There was an article in a recent issue of Harvard Business Review with the title being: What’s the Value of a Like? The “Like”, of course, refers to the likes in the social media that are a hot commodity everyone is seeking after. The article talks about how social media endorsements in form of “Likes” not working the way you might think and how companies spend a huge amount of money (perhaps billions) on elaborate efforts to establish and maintain a social media presence. The author argues that the mere acts of liking a brand, for example, on Facebook does not affect a customer’s behavior or increase purchasing, nor does it spur purchasing by friends, which at the end of the day is what everyone is after: generating leads and profitable revenue. The author then makes some suggestions on how to measure the return on Facebook Likes, in order words the ROI of social media. Very interesting read, highly recommended.

Reading this article reminded me of an experience I had with one of the companies I worked with in the past. This particular company had already given some consideration to which platform they thought would best reach their target audience and they had chosen LinkedIn to start with. The plan was to test the waters first and then extend their reach to other platforms in the near future. The justification for that decision was because they were not directly selling to consumers, rather other companies, and governmental agencies, and on LinkedIn there is a better chance of reaching professionals. After about eight months they had a follower base of about 450 and on average they were doing 4-5 online postings per month. The general impression within the company was that this social media thing was not delivering any value and my task was to bring proof to either refute or verify this hunch, furthermore make a recommendation on what the next step(s) should be. After a couple of internal conversations with key employees who were involved with this project from the beginning and the main sponsor (CEO), it became obvious that

the real reason behind the company wanting to go social in the first place was the fear of missing the boat

because their competitors and everyone else was doing it!, Mistake #1. There was nothing written or documented as to what the objective of going social should be, Mistake #2. Officially there were no resources allocated for this task, Mistake #3. And no one was really responsible to make sure what gets posted is consistent and is in line with the strategy, Mistake #4. The internal process of getting something posted was whenever someone in the organization thought they had something worth posting, they would forward it to the marketing assistant along with a couple of pictures and the assistant would simply post it on the company’s LinkedIn page. The reason anyone felt compelled to send any material to the marketing assistant was because the CEO had made it very clear that he would personally look at which department had the least number of posts and would personally “talk” to them.

Another angle worth pointing out here is the number of the company’s follower base of 450+ after 8 months which was not bad considering what they were putting into it. Not bad at the first glance that is. I had someone dig up exactly who those followers were. It was a manual time-consuming task because LinkedIn did not provide the function of simply downloading a list of your company followers. After a few hours, a list of followers was generated including job titles and company affiliations and it was astonishing to see who actually the followers were. Over 40% were job seekers, 25% were company’s own employees, 15% were the competitors, a whopping 4% of the followers were their current customers and/or others in the same industry segment and the rest were too diverse to make any conclusions from. That meant this whole initiative was under way for the sake of about, give or take, 20 individuals who for the most part we could not even be sure if we can connect the number of impressions provided in LinkedIn statistics to them.

Now I do not claim to be anything even close to an authority on social media. Nevertheless, social media is a channel and like any other channel, it needs to be managed. In my opinion, there needs to be clear objective(s) behind what expected outcomes should be for you to be able to focus your efforts and the limited resources you have in the right direction. In this particular case, fear was the number one driver for pushing a social media agenda and the strategy for execution was “we’ll-figure-it-out-as-we-go-along” and therefore the results were speaking for themselves. No matter what the channel may be, delivering a consistent message is key to success and you can only do that if every stakeholder understands the objectives.

Social Media is a marketing channel and like any other marketing channel, it needs to be managed

What also makes managing a social channel even more challenging is the fact that you have no control over the functionality of the platform you are using and while you may invest lots of time, effort and money in building something up you are entirely at the discretion of those running that particular platform. As an example, being able to see who is following your company was a feature offered by LinkedIn. You could not download a follower list but you were still able to see who is following you and that is how we could do the analysis I just mentioned, as well as engaging with your followers which is the whole essence of social media (I think). As of this writing that feature has been disabled, meaning even as an administrator you are no longer able to see who is following your company. LinkedIn explains the disappearance of this feature due to “privacy reasons” which I found very odd because LinkedIn, does allow an individual to see his/her followers and does allow members of a group see who the other followers are. Unless LinkedIn decides to disable these other functionalities and rebrand themselves as UnlinkedIn or something, I see this as an inconsistency their policies and what they refer to as “privacy reasons”. So under normal circumstances, my advice would be to do the due diligence to make sure you know exactly what a particular social platform could offer and how it could help you reach your goals, however, yesterday’s charted territory may become uncharted on the Social front even as you are reading this. At the same time, the opposite is true, meaning new functionalities surface on regular basis. So do your homework, do the research, have clear objectives, and keep up if you are going Social.

by: Ali Hoorsun – September 2017