The Flaw of Assumptions

Everyone has a solution, but how well do they know the problem? Unfortunately, when it comes to social media, many focus on the former and completely ignore the latter. A social media strategy can’t be based on assumptions, and it’s not enough to show up on Twitter or Facebook and expect a community of brand evangelists to simply materialize out of thin air. It’s easy to look at the gaudy audience bases of those channels or see statistics that say the vast majority of people are leveraging social media in the purchase process and extrapolate those to any brand.

Unfortunately, those numbers really only come into play when companies use social media for its intended purpose. It’s a simple equation: listen + engage = action.    

 

It’s when companies operate in a silo that problems occur. The assumption that simply being on social media and being smarter than the competition will result in tangible business metrics is about as logical as owning a jet ski in the desert. It looks good towed behind a truck, but it’s not serving any purpose and more than likely slowing down the trip and costing more money in gas.

There can also be negative, and often unrealized, consequences to utilizing social media purely as a one way street without listening to the feedback of a company’s audience. A growing number of Facebook users are providing negative feedback to posts on brand pages. This negative feedback is rarely as overt as leaving a comment or unliking a page in response to the post. People are hiding particular posts or even the entire page altogether.

This happens because marketers are focused on the tangible and seemingly positive numbers – how many people like the page or a post along with overall comments. But these companies are still not asking the crucial question of what their audience needs and why they liked the page in the first place. The most crucial metric marketers should focus on is influence, which tracks how their audience shares the content and engages with the brand. Tools like Klout and PeerIndex provide the best snapshot of a company or individual’s overall relevance and audience engagement on specific topics and also compare their influence to similar social media profiles.

But it’s never too late for a company to shift their strategy to focus more on influence through engagement. Before taking the initial steps into social media, take the time to understand the audience – how they’re using social media, their distinct needs and the best ways to meet them.

It’s important to communicate the solution, but more importantly, that solution must be targeted toward those who need it and must solve a legitimate unmet need. It’s difficult to give the right answers if companies don’t know the questions.

Listen to your audience, even when they aren’t talking about your company. Understand them as people with needs, not just metrics to demonstrate ROI. Respond to them. Answer the questions they ask, not the ones you assume they should be asking. And if you live in the desert, take some time to think about whether you really need that jet ski.