Anti-Social Media Policy: A Bad Corporate Strategy

© 2019 March Oyinki

The digital media industry is worth $2 trillion dollars and is one that cannot be easily wished away by the anti-social media policies of a few corporate entities. Social media has generated more revenue than all the traditional advertising channels combined, including TV, radio, billboards, and newspapers.

The industry is also one that has created more jobs in the last few years. Social media is evolving rapidly and it is increasingly, becoming an ecommerce platform used by business owners to promote sales of their products and services. Practically, no corporate organization is without some form of social media presence, and it has now become an important channel for customer feedback and stakeholder engagement.

The corporate world accounts for 61% of all web traffic, and corporate social, which is the use of social media in the workplace,  makes up only 4% of this number. The global business community influences the growth of the Internet tremendously. Research shows that 70% of web traffic occurs within the work hours of 9 am to 5pm. By this statistic, it becomes clear that a larger percentage of the audience of most digital marketing campaigns target the working class.

The number of active social media sites globally, is currently about 197. One begins to wonder how such large number of social networking sites would be scrambling for just 4% of the social media users available in the corporate sector. This figure is quite dismal, particularly when considered from the angle of ecommerce.

Entrepreneurs are the ones who need to sell their products and services, so they are the people that should encourage increased participation on social media. Regrettably, that is not the case, because despite the low social media presence of the corporate sector, increasingly, efforts are made by some multi-nationals to cut down on access to social media sites within their organizations.

The question, therefore, is who is going to buy the products and services that these organizations produce and are advertising regularly on the Internet and through social media platforms? Many B2B audiences in various organizations have been reduced to the barest minimum by the same companies that have continued to spend millions of dollars in advertising budget.

It is quite disappointing to notice that many corporate organizations are beginning to introduce anti-social media policies in the workplace, and this is regardless of the present poor social media traffic coming from this sector. Evidently, most companies do not have competent social media advisors that can guide and help them to develop an effective social media policy that can produce a high ROI.

Any corporate entity that fails to understand the importance of social media in the daily running of its business is inadvertently naive; because, by the end of 2019 the number of social network users will reach 2.77 billion, a rise from 2.46 billion last year. 

Statista - Number of social network users worldwide from 2018 to 2021 (in billion)

A total of 24% of smartphone users globally come from the corporate sector itself. A survey conducted by OfficeTeam found that the average office worker spends about an hour daily using their cell phone at work for non-work activity; most of which is spent conducting a search on the web for products.

As one who has been in the corporate sector for a long time, I can say quite confidently, that most of the 20% after hours usage of social media, is for sending business-related messages to colleagues, requesting for reports and updates of transactions that happened during the day at the office. This whole issue about ‘zero-social-media-in-the-workplace’ campaign is totally faulty.

It is time for the corporate sector to accept the reality that social media is the leading method of communication. If anyone argues against this fact, then they should check the last time they used a facsimile machine to transmit a business correspondence. Even sending SMS messages has become old school. Is there a single day that passes without receiving or responding a WhatsApp message on your smartphone? 

This anti-social media posture by the big corporations must stop and they should face the truth - that social media is here to stay and the earlier they embrace it, the better it is for everyone.