Why Big Businesses have terrible Social Media Strategy

Social media has graduated from a fad to a mainstream industry. It’s not only recommended, it’s becoming a necessity. If you’re a business, and you’re not actively engaging in a social media outreach program of one form or another, then you will soon lose out to your competition.

Think of it in these terms – how would your business look without a website? If you’re not going social, you might as well not even have a website.

Social media is becoming more and more competitive. Businesses that are starting to realize how important it is, are also jumping in without any guidance, and creating a frenzy. This just leads to frustration, banned accounts on twitter, and confused customers.

You wouldn’t jump into opening your business, instead you create a plan. Even when you setup marketing campaigns you generally devise a plan first. You can’t just jump into social media without a solid strategy.

Social media is almost like air. It’s everywhere online, you can feel it against your skin, watch it move trees and leaves, and you have the choice to breath it in or die. There are conversations happening in every frontier of the web, every internet user has a voice and it only takes one person with a voice to bring down a large corporation, OR one person to bring 1000 new customers or referrals.

For the consumer social media is the answer to the globalization of businesses. In the modern world its hard for one person to be heard in the crowd, social media evens out the playing field a bit. For the brand, social media can and SHOULD scare the hell out of you. You need to be proactive, and handle your social media presence with skill, but you also can’t ignore it.

Many businesses just ignore social media altogether and just hope it goes away. Even facebook ignores social media, and they are the leading social media company! (Read about their failure to allow ownership changes on facebook pages).

It’s not easy to be social, but it’s so worth it. Most businessmen now know that they need to be involved with social media. A social media strategy does not just mean throwing up a twitter profile, and a facebook fan page. There are companies that get social media and those that don’t. Just follow any social media blog long enough and you will see tons of examples of social media embracing companies that get it, and they are killing the competition.

Ironically some of teh world’s largest corporations are the least social savvy. Anyone with half a brain would think that these huge companies with all the money would make it easy for customers to engage with their brands.

The main reason huge fortune 500 companies are so bad at social media strategy is they just don’t understand the term engagement. They are so used to internal segmentation, that this is also their main method of functioning externally. A good example would be sommeone working in the technology department of a publishing company. They know all about social media, and can setup wordpress, and have an iphone, and know all about Twitter, but they don’t know anything about other aspects of the brand. They’re not the marketers, or the salesmen. Without some collaboration between the two internal segments a social media strategy can never be formed.

Currently there is no perfect templates for social media strategy success. What works for one company does not work for all companies. It’s easy to think if you’re in B2B that you don’t need facebook or twitter and can just deal with linked-in, but some B2B can actually gain more from Twitter than a B2C can. It all comes down to what goals you’re trying to reach which you should setup in your social media strategy plan.

Until companies start collaborating and creating a hollistic whole-company approach in creating their social media strategy big businesses are going to fall by the wayside as their small to mid-size competitors who happen to be hungrier, and more social savvy end up taking their customers, and pass them by.

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