Today everyone blogs and we expect everyone to have their own blog, Twitter account, LinkedIn profile etc. Being present on as many services as we can. We can then measure measure engagement levels with one of the many different approaches (number of followers, sales, replies or even Klout rank).
What often don’t see is companies taking a deliberate decision not to be present on every social media fad, but instead decide to focus on a few communication channels and spend the rest of their resources on their actual product.
The one company that does this beautifully is twidroid. They make a deliberate stance that they don’t do tech support over Twitter and that you should use email. Their message is simple and it helps drive customer to the right medium.
We can take this a step further and take a look at different ways some of social media tools can be used:
Facebook Page
Is our audience on Facebook at all? Is this a replacement of Newsletter or do we expect to do tech support and discussions here? Do we just count number of fans so we have more than competition?
Twitter account
Do we plan to become a leader and Tweet about our industry or do we just push announcement every once in a while. Is this account to do tech support over? Do we want followers or engagement? How personal is the voice of the account?
Blog
Do we position ourselves as progressive thinking company that regularly writes in-depth editorials or do we push product announcements and speaking gigs. What would be most useful for our business goals (hyping up vs. consumer focused)?
LinkedIn and everything else
While we all love new social networks the only real question is – do we actually reach anyone on that platform?
Do you know why your social media presence is structured like it is? Or is it legacy setup already?
Careful, you’re sounding like a social media expert.
Sorry, Jure but I feel the need to submit a reply your post.
What caught my eye, was the statement that “Today everyone blogs…”. I would say that this statement is, at least in Slovenia – but also in the West (see the last PEW Internet Report on Blogging in US) – an oversimplification. In fact, according to the last data, published recently by the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenian, only 25% of Slovenians aged 10-75 years reads blogs, while even less of them have their own active blog (8%).
Further, I would argue that also the second part of the same sentence is more a wish than a fact. If we analyze the number of passive/active bloggers in Slovenia we can see that the growth is slow and there are no signs that the existing trend will change in the recent future. See for details the RIS report “Blogi v Sloveniji 2009” (http://www.ris.org/index.php?fl=2&lact=1&bid=10383&menu=0). The figures speak for them selves: since 2005 the number of active bloggers increased for 8 percent points – less that the relative growth of internet users in the whole Slovenian population. To put it differently, the internet use is proliferating quicker than “active” blogging.
Considering this trends, Facebook and SNSs are a more an exception than a rule. Hovever, the problem is that the adoption process has been driven by the media hype. Consequently FB users (including economic companies) haven’t realized SNSs’ economic, marketing, etc. potentials. From the social perspective this is a positive news, as the Slovenian sub-network is less polluted with “brand” friends than in other parts of the global FB community.