A management company that doesn’t have social media?
What an example!
One might wonder how we can efficiently manage a company’s social media if we ourselves are not able to be present there. We are a paradox!.
The answer is simple: we know how to manage social media and handle communities but we are not willing to invest our time in them because the return is not worth it for us. We have chosen other ways to reach our commercial target that require less effort and are more effective.
This approach we take for ourselves we always and also apply to our other clients. We manage the social media of several clinics, shoe stores, online clothing shops, restaurants, schools, public entities, and architecture firms with notable success in audience and user interaction; however, we have recommended many other clients to completely ignore Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as communication channels. The reasons are weighty and common sense…
Which companies do we recommend to skip social media?
Our experience tells us that in some specific cases, social media will not bring positive value to the company and its presence will end up being merely symbolic. The most common cases are:
- Small companies in the industrial sector or service providers to other companies
- Industrial sector companies with fewer than 10 employees
- Companies that sell very specific products, services or content not aimed at the general public
- Companies unable to generate their own content and whose business scope covers a very limited sector
- Companies that do not have an internal person genuinely interested in social media and corporate communication
- Companies with few resources that meet any of the above premises
What could we publish on Facebook and Instagram?
Facebook, which was once the social network par excellence, is currently being overshadowed by Instagram, perhaps because Instagram is a more cheerful and interactive network and (as of today) is not so contaminated by fakes and negativity.
Both social networks share many points in common (including the owner, the almighty Mark Zuckerberg) although their biggest divergence is Instagram’s inability to repost third-party content. That is, Instagram is designed to publish original content and on Facebook you can easily share others’ content. In return, Instagram relies on hashtags# and mentions@ to refer to others, but always under the premise of uploading personal content.
Given this, one of the key points when considering opening and managing networks like Facebook and Instagram is to assess if the company has the capacity to generate original content. If the answer is yes, the next question is whether this content interests a general audience, a broad target or a very specific sector and, regardless of the answer to the above, the next question is whether this audience could be our commercial target (buyer of our product/service). If the answer is no, perhaps we should reconsider the matter.
Publishing blog articles and news on social media
In our specific case, at Marabelia, we have the capacity to generate original content. Proof of this is our blog, which receives hundreds of visits daily, but who reads our blog? Is it our commercial target?
The answer is clearly no, except for rare exceptions. Our most-read blog posts have a very technical focus, we talk about CSS, WordPress, SEO from a technical or experimental point of view… We talk about topics that mainly interest those who are like us, that is, our competitors, those who can copy us, those who can learn from us and, at the same time, those who will never hire us.
Our blog is written with a philanthropic purpose: we want to teach others what it cost us so much to learn, but we do not want, nor can we, sell anything to our potential buyer, for that we already have the rest of our website…
What sense would it make to publish our blog on social media? Basically, our Facebook (or Instagram) would become a container for blog articles, there would be hardly any interaction and our profile would be technical and symbolic, low profile. A nonsense.
Publishing our products and services on social media (Pure Marketing)
It is true that besides blog articles, there are many other contents with which we can feed social networks, for example, our portfolio. Every new completed project is an opportunity to showcase our talent on social media, it is a way to energize by providing value with original content and blah blah blah…
Who cares? To be frank, we have lived the experience… We start from the premise that our followers are A) Friends, collaborators, and acquaintances, B) Clients we have already worked with and C) A small group of potential clients who came bouncing from who knows where they recommended us and who, for some daring reason, liked us and for the same daring reason, must have visited our web portfolio and know perfectly how we work.
Maybe by persuasively publishing our work we manage to remind the potential client (C) that we exist. Maybe the potential client (C) had forgotten us and by seeing our latest website turns on the light and decides they want to do something with us; or maybe a friend/acquaintance (A) shares our latest work and it reaches another potential client (C) who might be interested in hiring us and ahem… Yeah, right!
Among all the parametric variants that can make us known or convince others, none is done in a conventional format for an uninterested audience. That is, publishing a work or product no matter how beautiful it is is not enough to spark interest of my follower unless my follower was already previously interested in hiring (me). On the other hand, no content will spark the interest of my general public, unless it has something exceptional, trendy, controversial or emotional. And the work portfolio, as a rule, has none of the above.
Publishing personal life on social media: The daily life of an Instagrammer or Facebooker
We have reached the most interesting part of this article. You read the previous paragraph where I said “no content will spark the interest of my general public unless it has something exceptional, trendy, controversial or emotional….” well, this is precisely all that our daily life can contain. Exposing personal life works and moreover it is what works best.
When Marabelia had Facebook and we wanted to boost our Social Media Ego, we only had to post a photo of the Marabelia team doing anything, no matter what and bam! dozens of likes. Immediate success. Other real examples:
- We gave our opinion on a trendy and controversial topic, for example, work-family balance and the difficulties of women entrepreneurs in society. 50 comments. Immediate success.
- A photo of Isabel’s newborn twins. 200 likes. Immediate success.
That’s how you enjoy posting on a social network. It’s a pity that at Marabelia we are not prone to public exposure because we had the makings of being cooperative influencers. 😛
Joking aside, the truth is this passion for public exposure must come from the protagonists themselves. It cannot be a pretense. This is the soul of the Instagrammer who has revived this social network. A person willing to stop their routine to capture that fleeting moment and share it joyfully and effortlessly, as a unique and exceptional moment. And, as we said, at Marabelia we are not made of that stuff. We are so immersed in our work that we see influencers as mere potential marketing tools, on the other hand, we are not very narcissistic and we never look good in photos.
Finally, we particularly discard Instagram because we don’t feel the need to expose ourselves to generate that content our audience expects.
What’s going on with Twitter?
A special case, Twitter, another network that is going downhill. If being a successful Instagrammer requires a special kind of stuff, being a Twitter user means that stuff must be mixed in a cement mixer.
Metaphors aside, this social network has a unique idiosyncrasy. Although for many community managers it is maintained by automating content from Facebook to Twitter, the truth is that this makes no sense and turns it into another dead social network. If it’s not interesting, it doesn’t work, and if it doesn’t work, it’s dead.
What sells on Twitter? A few characters, almost always without images. On Twitter, what sells is something as ethereal as fleeting: controversy. On Twitter, wit and mastery of the platform work. Twitter is not recommended for companies that want to get into thorny situations (because thorns hurt) and it’s also not recommended for companies that aren’t willing to pay much attention to Twitter.
Twitter is fine if there is a communications manager in the company who is a fan of Twitter and willing to make this social network the company’s preferred communication channel, offering a public and immediate Q&A service. It works well for medium and large companies, especially in services, and works better than well for public institutions that want to provide quality customer service through social networks.
On the other hand, Twitter is the paradise of trolls, who roam freely causing trouble. The total anonymity behind the nickname is an area of extreme freedom where anyone, without knowing who or where, can trash you for the slightest offline slip you tweet.
Too much risk for little return. In our cooperative, we never considered tweeting anything in particular. It was our first social discard.
And YouTube?
Definitely yes. This is our social network. We can publish our video tutorials that will be quite useful for our clients, and we can also continue the path we started on our blog: publishing technical content and continuing our philanthropic work.
YouTube is the social network we could recommend to almost any company because it does not require being constantly alive. One video is enough reason to have a YouTube channel. And a good corporate video about the company or product is always an added value for a website, a living sample of our work for a client, and an excellent element for online positioning.
Being a successful YouTuber (getting a channel with thousands of subscribers) is another story… but we will talk about that in another chapter.
In general, this is the truth that almost no community manager is going to tell you…
Achieving success on a social network is almost as complex as succeeding in business (although not directly proportional). Whatever your business is (even if you meet all the premises for needing social networks), you will face tremendous difficulties making an impact on the social media audience. If there were a foolproof recipe to become trending or an influencer and have thousands of followers, if it existed… the formula would sell for a fortune. Generally, any social network fit for success requires time, a lot of effort, and persistence to make an impact. This time and effort translate into investment, either your own time or money so others invest their time and effort.
Well-managed Facebook and Instagram ADS campaigns help a lot. If besides selling interesting products, you generate interesting content and focus on an interesting audience, reinforcing with paid campaigns on Facebook and Instagram, you can start building an interesting social network… Even so, patience is fundamental. Followers won’t reach thousands unless you buy them, and the general public is no longer what it used to be… the current scenario is a saturated market with social networks and an audience getting tired of more of the same. To earn the trust and loyalty of a target you have to find a potential niche and work very hard, with creativity and passion.
On the other hand, although it seems nowadays that having social networks for a company is absolutely necessary, the truth is it’s not. There is a “lobby” of social management very interested in making us believe otherwise, but the sad reality reflected is that a dead social network (without followers, without posts, or without interactions) is absolutely negative for brand image and digital reputation. The truth is it is better not to have one. It is better to live without a digital footprint than to have a negative footprint. That is the truth. The truth that a community manager interested in capturing you will not sell you, but that a company with social values like the one we aim to manage might expose you to, if the case arose.
I don’t know if my company needs social networks…
If you have doubts about how to manage your company’s marketing and online reputation, talk to us! Here we stand out from the rest by speaking frankly. We are realistic, we know the environment, and we have been working for a long time with all kinds of companies.
If you have questions about our marketing services for companies, you can visit our online Marketing section:
https://marabelia.com/marketing-digital-valencia/
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