This is a guest post from Bhavik Soni, a social media expert based in India, He explains the honeycomb model of social media.
The honeycomb model of social media provides marketers with a valuable framework. SMM or social media marketing is an essential part of digital marketing today. The rise in social media site usage in the last few years has contributed significantly to the ROI that brands can achieve by promoting their promise on these sites.
However, it is essential to remember that managing a brand image on social media is different from using a personal profile. You cannot just post whatever you want whenever you want to. You must have a plan, a calendar, and a marketing strategy to fulfill your business’s objectives.
Moreover, you will have to employ data analytics to make sure those tactics are working and modulate the strategy to find ways to continuously improve. There are various models and frameworks based on which you can build your social media strategy.
In this guest post on The Marketing Sage Blog, I’ll discuss one of the most popular frameworks.
Why is Social Media Marketing Important?
There was a point when social media marketing or SMM was a secondary part of marketing that you did casually and intermittently. Today, if you are not present on all the popular social media networks, people may not trust you enough to buy from you.
While 54% of people use social media to look for products, 37% find inspiration for their next purchase from social media.
PwC 2018 Study
Marketers are also taking advantage of this, spending more than $89 billion in 2019 itself. This amount has gone up even higher in 2020, with a projection of $110 billion in 2021.
“Today’s consumers trust the wisdom of the crowd, what somebody in their network says about something,”
Rick Kauffeld, a PwC Principal
Social media marketing can boost your traffic and conversion rates by increasing brand awareness, loyalty, and authority.
It allows you to create a solid brand image and provides another channel for offering sales and customer service. Awareness will enable you to not only improve consumer engagement but also gain important insights into customer behavior.
Social media marketing is cost-effective with a high ROI, allowing even small brands and start-ups to harness its power. Many consumers spend most of their time on social media sites providing your brand with an enhanced chance of reaching a wider audience and expanding your customer base on these sites.
The Seven Building Blocks of Social Media for Business
The Honeycomb Model
The concept is the Honeycomb Model, proposed by Jan Kietzmann, Kristopher Hermkens, and Ian McCarthy, a group of professors working in Canada, to explain why social media is so useful when it comes to brand and sales propagation. The idea behind the honeycomb model is that of the seven key building blocks outlined within the model, companies can select the ones most relevant to their business.
The model consists of seven blocks, namely:
- Identity
- Presence
- Relationships
- Reputation
- Groups
- Conversations
- Sharing
Identity
Identity refers to data privacy issues or how users are identified on a social media site, It also refers to the amount of personal information gathered to establish that identity. Every user has limits how much personal information they are ready to share. This limit differs as you move through the customer base and depend on various factors like age, profession, sex, socioeconomic status, etc. A brand must never ask for more information than their target demographic is ready to share. Moreover, it must take stringent measures to protect that information and maintain its privacy.
Presence
The presence of a user with other users, and their awareness of each other can significantly impact a brand. Factors like the context, the relationship between two users, and the relevance of each other’s’ knowledge to the brand itself all create an influence. There is also a matter of status. For example, there will be an unequal distribution of the knowledge regarding a celebrity endorsing a brand and their fans.
Relationships
Relationships form a multi-layered network in social media, whether a brand is at the center or not. Depending on the number of things in common between two users and their desire to know about, connect with, and influence each other, one user could sway the other’s preference for the brand.
The brand, too, must maintain a delicate balance between how far it would want to encourage associations. They must obtain the user’s consent to reveal their presence and control what aspects to show to others.
Reputation
Reputation can mean a variety of things when it comes to the SMM of brands. Reputation is the perception of the brand’s status and its users, including oneself, in several settings and contexts. Three critical points come up here.
A brand could have a positive or negative reputation on social media. It could have a reputation in social media within a specific group, but zero buys from them due to certain restrictions. And last, a brand’s reputation could vary as the context and the users’ sentiment change.
Groups
Groups refers to the rules and protocols. The feature of forming groups is present in most, if not all, social media sites. Some groups are explicit, some less so. Group members could have equal status or not. Groups based on two or more different criteria could overlap too. When groups are formed and surround a brand, it is imperative to have terms and rules to regulate the members and their behavior.
There should be moderators to take over more critical issues too. Relationships between groups require definition to prevent conflict.
Conversations
Conversations can turn out to be the starting points of relationships as well as reasons for engagement. Exchanges can be between a brand and one or more of its users. Or it could be between two or more of its users.
The former establishes the nature and tone of customer service provided by the business, while the latter can indicate the brand’s reputation. The nature of the conversation depends on its speed, frequency, and context. A brand can also contribute to a discussion involving a product or service it provides and thus increases its conversion chances.
Sharing
Besides conversations, another prominent feature shared by nearly or all social media sites is sharing and managing content. When a brand manages its presence on a social media site, they must optimize the content they deliver based on the type of objects shared and the algorithm employed in that social media site.
This content must find common ground between the brand’s users that they can relate to and converse on. There must be strict rules to define the type and context of the content one can share concerning the brand.
Conclusion
Social media can be the make-or-break factor that determines the success of a brand. If a brand can use the right formula and take the right steps, it can easily attain its goals. By keeping in mind all the aspects of social media marketing discussed above, a brand will manage all aspects of its online presence clearly and smoothly.
Bhavik Soni is a creative writer at Auto Monkey. We provide an original analysis of the latest happenings in the social media industry. Connect with Latest Social Media Trends and News plus tips on Twitter, Facebook, and other social tools on the web.
Photo by Sanjay Shivakumar on Unsplash
You can set up a time to chat with me about your marketing challenges using my calendar. Email me jeffslater@themarketingsage.com Call me. 919 720 0995. The conversation is free, and we can explore if working together makes sense.
