Social Media for Organizations: What's the (Biggest) Problem?

One of the biggest problems social media organizations face is gaining followers; even though they have a social media strategy, the organization must ensure their content is more than just advertisements. The organization must create a brand persona through content that adds value to their customer.

Social media is not a substitute for one channel marketing, such as an advertising space in a newspaper or a 30-second clip for a radio or TV commercial. According to Jeff Bullas, with one channel marketing, companies would set up their marketing campaign for the year but now organizations must adjust to continuous marketing. If marketing needs to be continuous, the posts must become more creative and veer away from constant obvious advertising. Social Media Today rates “being too spammy” as the second reason why organizations are not gaining followers. The traits of “spamming” include posting the same messages over and over again and posts sounding too sales like.

Posts by organizations on social media need to add value in order to retain and gain followers. Only talking about yourself and bombarding people with even more advertisements about how much they need you and your organization will cause them to unfollow you as you are not posting value-adding content, according to Inbound. Due to the qualities of social media and digital platforms, people have become picky about which brands and pages they choose to like and follow.

There are various value-adding posts organizations can incorporate to appropriately connect to their community of followers and entice potential followers. Social Media Today provides examples of value-adding posts, including sharing useful information relevant to the field of your product or reposting posts of followers to make them feel special.  Running a social media competition with winners to promote your product can be value adding to the customer because they can win a product or gift bag; however, this should be a rare event to gain followers. It can simultaneously be value adding to your organization in gaining followers and using the followers to promote you, by liking and commenting to enter the competition. Posting beautiful content such as the environment where the product could be used or images that relate to the lifestyle of the audience are vital to breakup clear advertisement posts.

I am by no means arguing that the product is not vital in the content of the social media posts because losing focus of the product would not be financially tenable. The organization simply needs to find more creative ways to make the product the forefront without making it obvious. The wisdom of this approach does depend on what you are giving away; adding value is not inherently transactional. Still, the value is not destroyed simply because the company is giving something away as opposed to directly selling their product. The value of the content supplements the value of the product and company through their online persona.

The customer needs to feel as though the organizations social media platform has more to offer than their product line; the customer can find that on their website. On the social media platforms, the customer wants to connect to the meaning of the brand. The biggest problem organizations then face with social media is they use the outlet to purely advertise, which prevents them from gaining followers. Adding value is not transactional but it is vital in showing the customers that they and their time are respected.