Proposed Social Media Management model
Our framework consists of seven building blocks through which we will develop the social media strategy.
• Identity: Elements of identity are important when companies are seeking to advertise. Facebook advertising is based on the location, age, gender and more. It is also dependent upon individuals registering their interests either directly or indirectly by liking various pages.
• Presence: This is an aspect of marketing which Facebook has recently started to develop, offering advertisers the option to target everyone in the specific location or simply people who live there (people often add their home location) or people recently in that location (which could include people travelling for holidays or visiting friends) as well as people travelling in this location, which is based on their GPS being enabled, so that Facebook can see that they are there.
• Relationships: The relationships element is about ‘managing the structural and flow properties in a network of relationships’. Effectively this concerns the way users are related to one another. In some social media networks relationships are key, such as Facebook. In others, like
Twitter, they are less critical. For businesses, there is a need to understand if this is essential data or not. This depends upon the overall
business strategy and whether relationships are needed to get the platform to function.
• Reputation: This is about ‘monitoring the strength, passion, sentiment, and reach of users and brands’. Many social networks build this in via endorsements, recommendations, volume of followers and fans. For businesses this is often translated into recommendations and reviews. Reputation matters in YouTube where advertisers are paid based on how many views and for how long. Pinterest also considers the number of pins that have been re-pinned.
• Conversations: In some social channels such as Facebook and Twitter there are many conversations. Twitter provides the option, when re-tweeting, of adding extra comments and subsequently developing the conversation. On the other hand there are channels where for more
detail, there is a requirement to register, to be part of the group to access the conversation.
• Groups: Membership rules and protocols are the block within groups.