The social age – more bark than bite?

Love it or hate it, you can’t escape it – social media is everywhere. It permeates into all areas of life – from family and relationships, work and careers, parenting and culture, politics and fundraising. It’s a fast changing beast which is home to an ever-growing number of phenomena. 

In its early form it took the shape of Friends Reunited (adult networking), Myspace (musician and creative networking) and Bebo (for the kids). It has since ballooned to include the royal couple of social media, Facebook and Twitter, among a wave of cousins: Instagram, Pinterest, Vine, Google Plus, Ello etc etc.

One of the biggest growth industries is social media. Where the role of looking after Twitter and Facebook once fell on the lap of someone in the office who had a vague idea of what they were doing, it now manifests in well-paid, high profile full time jobs – key positions in marketing departments as well as an important tool in the customer service armoury.

Despite this, not everyone is using it to their advantage. While some individuals and companies succeed in creating loyal legions of followers and fans, subtly marketing their product/cause to an audience ripe for the picking – think Innocent Smoothies, National Trust and O2 as well as Lady Gaga, Russell Brand and Stephen Fry – others totally miss the point. 

Take Odeon cinemas. Some unknown entity recently set up a fake Odeon Cinemas Instagram account – offering free cinema tickets to an ever-growing number of people who followed them and shared their post. Hundreds of thousands of people innocently signed up to this, sharing it not only on Instagram, but also on Twitter and Facebook – making it one of the most hotly talked about things on social media. A great marketing coup.

Of course it was too good to be true. It would’ve cost Odeon over £2m in free tickets. Instead of facing this head on and turning it to their advantage, Odeon appeared to shy away from this. Not so much as an outgoing post about it, though reams and reams of the same ‘We don’t have an Instagram account’ to the thousands of people Tweeting them about it. They missed a trick here, they could’ve turned it to their advantage – offering all those potential customers and social media followers free popcorn or a free drink when they bought two cinema tickets. A marketing win borne out of a marketing scam.

Sure, social media comes with its problems – overrun with anonymous commenters sharing their sometimes misguided thoughts, with trolls bullying people for the fun of it, with politically-charged accounts bombarding the internet with propaganda, giving a raison d’etre to wannabe celebrities with little in the way of talent and with fake accounts and pornographic spam. However, it also comes with infinite potential.

Take the #nomakeupselfie campaign which raised over £8m for cancer charities, the #everydaysexism campaign which fights the good fight for feminism, the millions of people (myself included) who have found jobs via Twitter and it has the power to help reunite people with lost friends, relatives and pets as well as children with soft toys.

If you take the time to understand social media, it will reap rewards. It has bark and it has bite.