Excursion 42

Timely Activities- The Case of Social Media Marketing

Key Activities are Timely. This may seem obvious, especially to businesspeople with direct operational and logistics experience. For new entrepreneurs or managers of growth companies, however, the challenge is recognizing that timing is just as important as purpose. Are the activities initiated and completed when needed? Are they operating continuously at the organization or triggered by specific events?

A great example of this is content-based marketing via social media. As I noted previously, many of my students believe that marketing a new product or service is as simple as posting to facebook. Certainly, facebook and other social media platforms can be powerful and inexpensive channels. At the same time, the factors that make facebook effective can work against the inspiring entrepreneur. For example:

there are nearly 100 million fake accounts on facebook

users see dozens if not hundreds of posts each day

certain times of the day record higher usage and viewing

average clickthrough rates on facebook and other platforms tend to be below 1%