We need more sales this Month. Launch one of those social media campaigns by 5 pm today!

The General Manager's call to battle will strike fear in to the heart of most marketers. You know the General Manager is a typical 50 year old so asks his wife to do Facebook, knows Tiktok is the sound of a quality Swiss watch and Instagram is a mis-spelling. How do you respond without reciting an alphabet of codewords which make the GM feel like a dinosaur after an overnight party? Its a tough gig. Fluff it and the exit door is yours...Try these smart questions to create involvement and direction:

(1) What is our path to our customers?

Mr Boss, the Social Media market is broad and evolving fast. Below is a detailed study of the types of Social Media and diffusion of information (Wani 2015). Realistically this is far too complex to use.

Mudasir Wani, 2015, Technical Report Thesis, Information Diffusion Models over Online Social Networks,

The simplest path to success is following others. The well regarded Hubspot 2020 annual users survey lists the primary forms of marketing as #1 Videos, #2 Blogs and #3 eBooks (Bodnar, Hubspot 2020)

For the tricky question of channel (Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok etc), well this depends entirely on what our buyers are reading. For B2B high value products, a survey by the sales team is often best.

(2) What content can we create quickly to impact our customers?

Below is a broader list of socail media post (Ansary 2021). A popular approach used by companies such as Microsoft is to engage trusted employees to lead blogs and forums (Constantinides 2014).

(3) How much effort is required to keep the campaign running?

Running a Social Media campaign can be very intensive. Below is a list of typical activities our teams will be doing (Lee 2015).

(4) How to make our content effective

Social Presence is influenced by intimacy and immediacy. Uploading large volumes of historical literature is neither. The purpose of marketer's Social Presence is to influence their social partners buying behaviour. The first three steps are be active, be interesting and be humble (Kaplan 2010). As a broad rule increasing intimacy and immediacy increases cost, but there exceptions and this is the reason for the existence of Social Media.

Mr Boss using the steps above could we could run a workshop including sales, engineering and maintenance... tomorrow in the boardroom.

References

1. Efthymios Constantinides, 2014, Foundations of Social Media Marketing, University of Twente, Faculty of Management and Governance, Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 148 ( 2014 ) 40 – 57

2. Ahemed Shamim Ansary, January 17, 2021, Marketing, Career Cliff Career Blog, 9 Types of Social Media Posts for Marketing and Traffic, Last Updated On: April 21, 2021 https://www.careercliff.com/types-of-social-media-posts/

3. Kevan Lee, VP of Marketing @ Buffer, The Social Media Manager’s Daily, Weekly, Monthly Checklist, Aug 27, 2015, https://buffer.com/resources/daily-social-media-checklist/

4. Andreas M. Kaplan, Michael Haenlein (2010) Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, Business Horizons (2010) 53, 59—68

5. Mudasir Wani, 2015, Technical Report Thesis, Information Diffusion Models over Online Social Networks, Applied Science & Technology University of Kashmir

6. Kipp Bodnar Hubspot 2020 Annual Survey, Not Another State of Marketing Report Trends and data from over 3,400 global marketers plus progressive strategies from our experts and partners, https://www.hubspot.com/state-of-marketing/content-marketing