Is Your Business Connected?

"Not having a presence on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, LinkedIn can damage your business" so says Making Money, March 2016 Vol. 21 #3.

This is such an ironic statement given the approach of my organisation, in which an IT specialist recently reminded staff not to use social media on company time. This means the Marketing department’s staff should not be updating the corporate Facebook or Twitter accounts during working hours.  Yet, it is a growing aspect of marketing tasks.  Making Money (www.what-franchise.com) quotes Warren Knight, who authored Think #Digital First: “Technology has disrupted many of the traditional ways businesses conduct their sales and marketing strategy.” He further posits that the nature of doing business has changed permanently as a result of technology.  

Like any other tool in the marketing tool box, social media is an important means of connecting to customers. Dutta (2010) revealed that at that time only of a third (19) of the world’s top 50 CEOs were on Facebook and fewer were on LinkedIn, two of the most popular social media sites, after all the FB community totals one billion – only China and India have larger populations.

Quite an eye-opener!  

Dutta also noted that having a social media presence as a business leader is important for three reasons, namely: (1) personal brand building, (2) engaging rapidly with all publics and stakeholders and (3) as a source of management/marketing information. Unlike the Baby Boomers, the generation of Millennials is more cynical about marketing messages and they are strongly influenced by peer-to-peer recommendations (De Pelsmacher et al. 2010). Indeed, one of the novel notions arising from this Social Media Strategy module, is the concept of social media’s connection to community, socialization and word-of-mouth marketing (Barker et al. 2013).

REFERENCES

(March 2016) "Are You On Trend?" Making Money 21(3) pp. 106-107

Barker, M., Barker, D., Borman, N. and Neher, K. (2013) Social Media Marketing: A Strategic Approach. International Edition. Boston: South-Western Cengage Learning.

De Pelsmacker, P., Geuens, M., Van den Bergh, J. (2010) Marketing Communications: A European Perspective. 4^th Edition. Essex: Pearson Education Limited.

Dutta, S. (2010) What's Your Social Media Strategy? Harvard Business Review 88(11) pp. 127-30.