Top Takeaways from Social Media Week

It has been a busy and exciting couple of weeks with Social Media Week and the World Business Forum. We want to share the top insights starting with Social Media week, a yearly get together of brands and agencies all discussing best practices on how to go about social media. Below are the top takeaways:

1. Social Media shifts from earned to paid media

The category is slowly but surely moving away from fluffy goal metrics such as more "likes" or "re-tweets".  2014 has seen the main social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter move away from the earned media space and into the more commercially viable paid media category. This allows firms to shift focus and be actually able to measure fluctuations in sales.

2. ROI taking center-stage

Social media for business is here, but not everyone knows how to use it yet. Case studies do show brands actually showing monetary wins from their social media campaign, but not all of them show actual ROI figures. Last year people talked a lot about ROI but this year some companies actually demonstrated ROI and proved it.

3. Know your audience

Know your global audience, research which times zones they are in, their language and what they care about. Once you know them well, you can create content that appeals to them and know when they will see it. The main social platforms have great analytics tools for this.

4. Go Glocal

Global brands' content can no longer be just local, it must be customized to become glocal local (glocal), this means that content must be customized to fit the needs of different audiences. It must be similar enough so that you share the same message but personalized to the different areas or groups that form your audience.

5. Be the cool kid

Similar to the previous point, global social media professionals must know the tools that their audiences use around the world. Just because one platform is very popular in the US does not mean that it has caught on another part of the world. As an example WeChat is the social platform in China despite the fact that is virtually unknown in the US.

6. Social media is not a channel

Social media is still not fully understood, some businesses still treat it as a weird peripheral strategy. Too often firms struggle with social media not through lack of connectivity but because they still treat it as a channel, rather than just another part of the organization. Businesses should strive to understand what they stand for and utilize social platforms as an extension of their identities.

There where definitely some interesting insights, we hope you find this list useful and remember to keep checking the blog for more enlightening insights from the World Business Forum.

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