SWOT Analysis: Social Media

Strengths:

• Large market reach or penetration
• Easy to set up
• Very useful if you are setting up a digital engagement strategy (to new people, young people)
• active community members who are willing to become institute representatives
• build a conversation and converse with others and build close networking bonds
• quick information exchange
• Direct contact with audience (almost like face-to-face)
• Lets you follow and connect with people/groups that interest you – but are not necessarily your friends (as with Facebook).  Authors, celebrities, co-workers, colleges, organizations, whatever
• Cost-effective in the sense most of the platforms are free. They just demand time
• Human factor: Your “brand” becomes more HUMAN
• Media exposure
• Twitter is in a strong market position in micro-messaging. Facebook is the only real competitor here – and they attract users for different reasons.
• Build strong, long term relationships through online social networking, at a faster pace than just relying on traditional face-to-face networking
• Gets tons of publicity.
• Is a thing on its own (almost no competition in microblogging)
• It is simple but powerful
• It is 100% social in an all-social web
• It is free
• Has developers creating hundreds of applications around its API.
• It’s definitely not evil (yet)
• Businesses, Organizations, Companies like it a lot
• It is real-time
• It is searchable
• It is totally RSS-enabled
• It is the ultimate link discovering and sharing tool
• Tweets show link attachments (may need to be shortened)
• Some post-secondary institutes use it openly (not blocked on intranets)

Weaknesses:

• Tough to train or convince management team/group members on social media principles
• A lot of “Why Bother” from most mainstream (i.e. Facebook users) people
• Needs more horsepower. It is down quite often
• Unequal distribution of tweets. 90% of tweets are coming from the top 10% of the users.
• Has low retention rate. Only 40%.
• Lack of tools or resources to track and monitor social media campaign results
• The API calls are limited. Hurts App growth
• What about information leakage, liability, security, and management?
• Effort vs results: Even if it is more measurable than other channels, it is  difficult (especially for small business operations) to balance the effort put on social media against the results obtained
• Consistency: Engaging with your audience at a direct level means more efforts in terms of keeping a consistent message/ corporate image
• Making up for mistakes: The time-frame to correct errors that affect your audience is less. Because you are heavily exposed, your company has to take action more promptly than if you weren’t (especially if people are having conversations about your brand, you will have to engage and clarify)
• Blocked at many work sites:  management sees it drops productivity; hurts bottom line

Opportunities:

• Creating/joining online presence on sites where the company currently doesn’t exist
• Great opportunity for individuals and organizations to connect and exchange information
• New target or niche markets that are untapped: students, the public
• Promotions, news, events  that can be offered through social media platforms
• Partnerships with other groups, organizations, schools, government, etc
• Penetration into a new geographical market quickly
• Recruitment of interested new members, students, public support
• Allows you to build short and long term relationships with prospects
• Humanizes the ‘brand’ and makes the recruitment process more personal
• Twitter could become our digital public face to the world
• Can gain deep insights into real-time trends, news, and all of us;  “be the pulse of the internet” as said by Founder Biz Stone
• Integration into real-time games, media, and apps. We’ve barely scratched the surface so far on what’s possible. Twitter as real time infrastructure.
• It can become a dominant search engine
• It is becoming the biggest social media marketing tool
• It may acquire some of the desktop clients or the url shortening services.
• It may become the dominant way for businesses to communicate with their customers
• quick delivery, branding opportunities, and enhanced marketing opportunities
• Twitter feeds that provide everything from alerts to new blog posts to breaking news and political messages. One example of a popular Twitter feed is @cnnbrk,
• Allow Tweets to be “crawled by Spiders”
• Being present where stuff happens: People research for info/products/services online and value more the opinion of other individuals than whatever a company may say about their own offer. If your company is present in an interactive environment like social media, the opportunities for engagement, conversion and most importantly clarification of doubts regarding your brand, are countless.
• Developing a following/ audience that auto-nurtures itself: Your efforts in Social media, together with the effort of your following may mean that your audience become your best sales people
• Talent coming your way effortless: Because of the possibilities of exposure that Social Media allows for, interacting here, may mean that future talent (in the shape of employees, partners or, you-name-it) will come your way through the power of connecting online!
• Reach out to certain groups that traditional media didn’t alow you to:  Because Social media is for everyone, sooner or later you’ll come accross people you never though of as your client. This opens the doors to building new relationships but also to valuable feedback that can help you develop your products or services more intelligently

Threats:

• Macro factors such as economy, will this affect your user base?
• Competitor is going after the same space or same audience with similar campaign
• Is the current campaign sustainable, can it continue?
• What obstacles stand in the way of success and failure?
• Attitudes on privacy: while lately it seems everyone is willing to share the most intimate as well as mundane details of their life – their could easily be a backlash against this trend
• We’ve all heard of a few embarrassing stories about over-sharing online, and a few high-profile examples might make people rethink their habits
• Micro-messaging may just be a fad. There’s nothing inherently awesome about 140 characters. Its working for now, but I’m sure theres a better way to share information out there then 140 character bursts
• It got too much publicity in a short time. May get burned out
• It is getting dangerously spammy/porn spammy
• Has no solid revenue model (future advertisements?)
• May have trouble with unauthorized accounts on behalf of groups/government/organizations/people
• Paid twitter streams may hurt the brand image
• Facebook may get even more twitty and compete face-to-face with Twitter in microblogging sphere
• Other social networking sites (MySpace, Tagged, Friendfeed, identi.ca, others)  may grow and steal market share
• Acquisition by a bigger player (Google) may disappoint early adopters and loyal users
• Advertisements on the sites

… information modified from JPMorgan, Insane Mission, Eyeflow, TechRepublic, YouthNoise, channelship, seowizardry,