Is social media essential for business success?
I am sure you have seen the news reports that UK pub giant J D Wetherspoon has shut down their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages for all 904 of their pubs and their head office. The move comes after the ongoing controversy over data leaks at Facebook.
One of today’s modern misconceptions is that social media (SM) is essential for business. The truth is, most companies totally mix cause and effect; they invest lots of money in SM as if those channels were a business goal in itself, but in reality SM is just a tool for talking and listening to your clients. Is social media the only way to perform those two tasks? Definitely not. There are numerous examples of companies being weak or absent across social media and still remaining insanely successful at the same time. Apple, for example, has never run contests or produced a huge amount of content for Facebook and it is still able to sell billions of devices. Same with Google, Tesla or SpaceX the list goes on.
“The reason for such behaviour is very simple to explain: Most companies prefer to talk (whilst not really having anything important or valuable to say). As a result, a huge amount of content is being produced every day by tens of thousands of Facebook business pages and, in most cases; this is a total waste of money and time. Seriously - every human being has a cap on how much information he or she a) can handle during the day b) wants to read to start with!
Most content produced by businesses is never even read. Even when you as a company seem to have likes and shares for a promoted post, those are often just bots. The truth is, when you are a company that has something truly unique and valuable to say, people will always find a way to get in touch with you. They either will come to your blog or get information from a traditional source like a well-known and trusted media outlet. On the SM front, people may subscribe to a CEO’s private channels, which is way more credible. If a CEO puts their name on something, they rarely put out bad content so as not to be associated with it!