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Social Media SWOT Analysis

Posted on 29. Jun, 2009 by Pete Hollier in Social Media

The Social Media SWOT Analysis

Is your business ready to enter the Social Media arena?

How do you determine your company’s Social Media readiness? SWOT

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats

The SWOT analysis has been used extensively in business to obtain an overview of the critical businesses issues. A SWOT analysis is simply a series of questions asked about your business to assist in determining the business’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. You can be assured all these aspects are present for your business in the Social Media realm.

It only makes sense to use SWOT analysis within the Social Media realm to determine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that business has or will encounter upon initiation of a Social Media program. Without a SWOT analysis it will be impossible to develop an effective Social Media Marketing Strategic Plan, develop company guidelines and effectively initiate the Social Media Program.

To leverage the power of Social Media businesses must understand:

• Strengths the company can utilize.
• Discover weaknesses to enable the development of solutions, thus changing weaknesses to strengths.
• Identify opportunities to improve business performance and competitiveness.
• Identify threats to develop effective responses to alleviate the business dangers.

To determine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats your business faces with regards to the implementation and deployment of a Social Media program the following questions are a starting point to what should be asked about your company’s SWOT:

Is your company and its employees, familiar with the Social Media tools available and understand how to use the tools to the company’s advantage.

The Tools of Social Media

The Secondary Tools of Social Media

Do you currently have employees / business owners who use Social Media for personal use and understand Internet Social Media interactions?

• Is there currently any business use of Social Media?
• How steep will your learning curve be?

Does your company have the creative people required to develop meaningful high quality content and communication on a regular basis?

• Are copy writers and public relations experts required?

Does your business understand the keywords customers and prospects use to find your Social Media content?

Does your business have strong change management skills?

• Will external change management consultants be required?
• Are staff and management adaptable and prepared to accept change?

Do you have a happy satisfied work force that your company feels comfortable allowing employee / customer interaction using Social Media tools?

• Are you confident a positive message will be broadcast by company representatives?

Does your company have a disgruntled work force which could cause detrimental company messages being broadcast to consumers via Social Media?

• What can be done to alleviate this issue?

Does the company feel comfortable with empowering company employees to interact with customers using Social Media?

How do you perceive you customers and potential customer’s familiarity and comfort zone with new technology?

Are your customers currently using and adapting to the various Social Media Tools and Networks available?

• Which networks, which tools?

Are you customers using Social Media for personal or business reasons?

How do you currently communicate with your customers?

• How will this communication change with Social Media?
• How will you manage the change?
• How will the effectiveness of both current and changed communication methods be measured?

Is it necessary to educate your customers on your product and services?

• How do you currently educate your customers?
• Is the information your customers require easy to understand and obtain?
• Do your customers have easy access to company representatives who possess the knowledge required?

Have you identified and evaluated the efforts if any of your competitor’s Social Media presence?

• What Social Networks are you competitors active in?
• What Social Media Tools are your competitors using?
• What is the consumers reaction to competitors Social Media initiatives?

This by no means a comprehensive list of questions which need to be answered to complete a SWOT for your business’s Social Media program however, it is an indication of the types of questions you should be considering about your business’s capability to thrive in a Social Media environment.

What questions do you think should be included in a Social Media Marketing SWOT analysis? Please comment.

The one question which stands out for me personally as being critical to the success of a Social Media implementation is: Are staff and management adaptable and prepared to accept change? Without doubt Social Media is a new way to interact with your customers and is in fact quite different to how businesses have communicated and interacted with consumers in the past. The ability to develop and manage the will to change how a business does business will be a contributing factor the the overall effectiveness of any Social Media initiative.

Written by: pete@seowizardry.ca a Web Site Performance Consultant

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