Social Media Simplified!


What is it with Social Media that it has been such a big hit with almost everyone on the internet these days? It is no longer limited to youngsters alone but people of all ages and groups can be found on Social Media today. The marketers of the 21st century have realized that they can get a good audience if they were to harness the power social media now commands and this has unleashed the era of Social Media Marketing.

Social Media Strategy

It has been almost 5 years now and every marketer and business owner is already looking at a social media strategy. A strategy that works and helps them achieve the business objective of increasing their revenue take from the market. In spite of spending a lot of money on SMM, very few have actually got what they wanted to achieve. But majority of them were not so lucky. The reason being, most of the marketers have been looking at social media as just another marketing channel through which they could sell and hope to earn more. In reality, the Social Media platforms are to be used as a market research tool and not as a sales platform. But, the people surfing the internet are looking for information and support with their queries before they go about spending their money.

We as digital marketing evangelists therefore want to spend some time in explaining Social Media for Businesses in a simplified and a logical manner. In order to do so we split the word SOCIAL into individual alphabets of S, O, C, I, A and L. To this we’ll assign a meaning for each alphabets which when put together and refined should become a Corporate Social Media Strategy guideline for business owners and marketers.

S – Support

The first letter ‘S’ should stand for Support and not Sales. Companies make the mistake of conceiving S for Sales and pay the price. The rule of E which stands for Experience for us states that Social Media should be for Sharing and promotion of a brand, but not for outright Selling. The primary objective of Social Media presence should be to Support your consumers, both Internal and External. Internal consumers are our Sales and Marketing folks who would want to position the products and services as per the company’s strategy. External consumers would be obviously your customers / clients.

O – Optimize

The second letter ‘O’ should be to Optimize. By optimize we mean the content on your page should be as fresh and relevant as possible and this would happen by posting good content regularly. Your consumers would not want to visit your page to read stale content but, give them something new and interesting on a regular basis so that they can relate to it better and share it. Yes, you got it right, that’s the primary reason we are here on Social Media, to make the consumers like and share content the content that you would want them to.

C – Customer First

We’ve assigned the third letter ‘C’ to Consumers as the rule of E states a ‘Customer First Policy’ always works, irrespective of you being a Profitable, Non-Profitable or even a Government organization. Your presence on Social Media should always be focused on catering to your Consumers or potential Consumers. Your company’s digital strategy should be designed around the idea as to how to keep consumers at high levels of engagement.

I – Interactive

The forth letter ‘I’ is for Interactive. Many of the companies have made the mistake of considering the social media wall to be just a wall as nothing moves on it. The primary idea of being on a social media site is to interact with consumers in order to gather information and positioning of products and services accordingly. Promoting interactive sessions and activities where consumers can participate will gather immense knowledge and information about the masses you are targeting.

A – Align

The fifth letter ‘A’ is to Align. To align your strategy on positioning your products and services based on the findings from your interaction with your consumers, both the existing and potential. It is better to provide products and services the way your clients like it than the other way around.

L – Learn

‘L’ is to Learn. It is the last and also the most significant one as it represents the gathering of knowledge and intelligence. Your objective of being on Social Media would be a complete waste of time and efforts if you do not intend to learn from the interactions and feedback with your consumers.

So when we put all the six alphabets together we get a simple corporate social media strategy which should be built around Support for your customer, Optimizing content, a strong Customer First attitude, regular interaction with your audience, Aligning business services and products according to the market needs and Learn from what you get hear from your audience. We need to understand that we as marketers are at the receiving end and have to develop an acceptable attitude which as a result will help you fine tune your business strategy and as a result will help you sustain the tough competition in the market.


Prrashanth SAVAS author

About the Author

Prrashanth H Nagaraj is the Founder and Managing Director of SAVASInc. He comes with around 16 years of professional experience across multiple industries such as Engineering, Banking, Insurance, IT, ITES and Digital Media. He is graduated in B. Eng. from University of Mysore and has a MBA degree, specialized in International Business from the University of the West of England, UK.