Covid-19: Great resources to help you re-think social media for your business
Updated: Jun 28, 2020
TL/DR
If the experience of Covid-19 has given you cause to review or question your current marketing efforts, you're not alone. That means there are heaps or useful pieces of information out there that can help you form plans. I'll do my bit to share these as I find them either here or on LinkedIn, but I strongly recommend you spend a little time reviewing this stuff before it's too late to learn the lessons and get right on track for the future - whatever it holds in store.
One of the many useful things that has happened during this lockdown in the world of social is the amount of information being made available to help businesses/brands understand the lay of the land.
Most of the time this data is available only to paying customers, or in occasional industry reports, but COVID-19 has compelled some insights businesses to open up and share their expertise.
While it might feel the horse has bolted on this, you can still glean a heck of a lot of useful information from these guys to inform your post-Covid-19 digital comms approach.
And if you haven't looked at some of these companies before hand, there are a whole host of other useful resources they are producing that can add value and help you shape your plans.
Brandwatch
Big shout out to Giles Palmer and the Brandwatch team for its daily and weekly (now fortnightly) Covid briefing notes from which I'd been able to glean invaluable insights at various points.
Each edition is focused on a different topic - naturally as it's responding to the themes of social conversation - but is also underpinned by consistent tracking of certain points of interest, such as survey data on the relative levels of anxiety people are feeling. This is combined with social listening data to present a broader view of how people are feeling.
Sign up for the Brandwatch Covid-19 updates here.
Socialbakers
Socialbakers was quick out of the blocks with an impact assessment report for marketers and has followed this with webinars to update the data. Why is it useful? For one thing it answers the question - with data - as to whether it's OK to continue posting on social in a time of crisis.
The answer was always yes, provided you are adapting your efforts to meet the needs of the audience and not blindly carrying on as usual. Qatar Airways promoting its loyalty scheme at the height of lockdown (see below) was wasted money at best and potentially brand damaging levels of tone deafness.
Another point of validation here is that while going silent is damaging in a time of crisis, Socialbakers was providing data that showed it was actually becoming cheaper to advertise on social platforms because of the lockdown.
Paying less to reach the right audiences with relevant content makes for a pretty compelling argument. These reports would help add weight to any decision you need to make or convince others of.
Take a look at Socialbakers' Covid-19 content here
WeAreSocial
I worked with We Are Social during my time at Vodafone and I've been a long time admirer of its blog. It's an incredibly rich source of insight and trend info.
Back in April, Strategy Director Mobbie Nazir published 'Do The Right Thing: The Role of Social in Covid-19'. At the time it articulated many relevant points about how businesses/brands needed to think about their use of social mid-lockdown.
More importantly, though, I think it's a really useful reference point for the way in which businesses need to view their efforts on social media on an ongoing basis.
It's quite a meaty deck, but it's worth your time reviewing it.
Happy reading!