In their 2010 report on the Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media, Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein explain 5 key points about being an organisation on social media. Let’s take a look to see if these rules are still relevant in today’s social media landscape, which you might say is vastly different to that of 2010.

You can read the report I’m referring to in this post here

1. Be Active

The first point is to be active on social media, this still stands true to this day. The report suggests that organisations need to extend their social media activity beyond just replying to negative comments and explaining why their product is the best, and references a company called Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) blog run by the CEO himself. This was very successful back then, but now businesses need to do more than just blog to be active and relevant on social media, in fact this blog is no longer running and blogs are now definitely not the first port of call for businesses. Now, Oracle has a Facebook page that posted on regularly with over 2 million followers, and also a LinkedIn page with more than 3 million followers. CEOs and company employees can now engage directly with their consumers and followers on Instagram or Facebook stories, by going live on Instagram or Facebook and replying to user comments in real time, or utilising Instagram’s question feature to get input from followers. Regularly updating all channels of social media is now the bare minimum in staying active.

2. Be Interesting

Being interesting is of course still very important on social media, and there are now many different ways of interacting with followers to find out what they would like to see on social media. The report mentions My Starbucks Idea, a page developed by Starbucks in 2008 to get ideas from consumers for new products or business suggestions. However, this does not solve the mystery of what content Starbucks fans want to see on Social Media. Today, it is so easy for brands to post a Facebook status asking for feedback or to put up and Instagram story with the poll function asking what followers want to see.

3. Be Humble

For their next point, Kaplan and Haenlein explain how it is important for organisations to learn about a social media platform before starting to use it. It is of course important to know how to use a social media platform before using it for a business, however in this day and age, it would be naïve to assume that marketers do not have their own social media accounts that they already know how to use, and probably do spend ‘countless hours’ on (maybe not on Second Life though!). Most businesses these days also have dedicated digital marketing or social media teams who have qualifications in using social media, in fact a quick search for ‘Social Media’ on Seek garnered 980 job results, so it is pretty safe to assume businesses are employing people who are already experts in using social media for business.

4. Be Unprofessional

Kaplan and Haenlein then suggest that businesses be unprofessional on social media. This is true to an extent, many brands have a more casual personality online and use memes or slang to interact with their audience. This works for a lot of brands, however these posts should still always be free from grammar/spelling errors and should still look professional and fit with the brand design guidelines. The reason that brand can get away with being casual online is that it is still done in a polished way. It would however, be out of place if a government organisation or a luxury brand was too casual or ‘unprofessional’. For a business like this, being out of character online could really damage the brand.

5. Be Honest

This rule is definitely one that will always be true. There are now many laws around the use of social media and post false or misleading content can be very serious and damaging to a brand.

Although some fundamental rules will never change, the application of these rules will change again and again, and some rules will simply not be relevant anymore. What do you think about the relevance of these rules? Leave a comment down below letting me know your thoughts.