Before Facebook, social media was no big deal. People can live without MySpace. We only went to the Internet to play games, stream videos, read blogs, or research.
Now, social media is almost like an extension of ourselves. Both individuals and businesses have grown highly dependent on them. Promoting a new product? It’s an Instagram post away. Announcing your engagement? Your Facebook post will spread faster than your employer’s memo.
Social media have reinvented communications and streamlined the way we work. Without it, our lives will become harder. It seems like a shallow thing to say, but it’s true; if you have no Facebook, you’ll only hear the news once it’s on TV. By that time, your neighbors and peers have already seen the news that will appear tomorrow.
Now, imagine if everyone had no Facebook because social media disappeared. How would it impact your business?
1. You’d Lose a Platform for Your Advocacy
Advocacy is crucial for your business. It is part of your corporate social responsibility. You can promote your advocacy through social media, creating content or sharing original posts about it. If your post garners substantial engagement, you can inspire your audience to also support your advocacy and help change the world for the better.
Social networking sites are also a tool for marginalized groups advocating for their rights. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram give them voices. The information they spread can reach your business, allowing you to discover or support another advocacy. But without social media, you won’t hear the marginalized’s voices, and your own advocacy may not gain the support it needs.
2. You’ll Have a Harder Time Finding Talent
LinkedIn and other job-hunting sites are also social media. Without them, it would be harder to find talent for your organization. According to a 2017 study by the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), 84% of companies use social media to find potential employees. Hence, if social media disappeared, those 84% would lose their candidate pool as well.
3. Ads Would Be Available Only on TV and in Print
Even if nobody likes to see ads on social media, they’ve proven themselves effective. They successfully increased brand awareness. Some even went viral because of their emotive or satirical quality.
If we lost social media, you’d have fewer platforms to promote your brand. You can only show your stationary ads in print such as newspapers, magazines, billboards, flyers, and brochures. Your video ads, meanwhile, can only show up on TV. These platforms are harder to secure because many other businesses will also compete for the best ad spaces on print and the best ad time slots on TV.
Thankfully, losing social media doesn’t mean we’d also lose search engines and email. Digital marketing will still be possible. As such, tried-and-true digital marketing strategies, such as search engine optimization (SEO), would still be relevant. Established SEO companies can help your business stay on top even without social media. You can rely on email marketing, attending events, and expanding your network the old-fashioned way. All the while, content is king, because it’s your ticket to attracting customers and brand loyalty.
4. You’d Go Back to Traditional Marketing Tactics
Even if you can still use digital marketing without social media, that alone won’t be enough to maintain your favorable market standing. For that, you have to turn to traditional marketing and public relations (PR) tactics. That means cold calling journalists, releasing an old-fashioned PR campaign, and relying on word-of-mouth marketing. Today, those strategies are outdated and ineffective, but if social media gets wiped out from the Internet, they’d surely be the marketing norms again.
5. You Might Regress with Your Sustainable Strategies
Social media allowed us to produce less waste when releasing ads and assessing job candidates. Thanks to them, we can cut down costs and help save the earth. If you have to produce print ads again because social media disappeared, your business will definitely regress in its sustainable strategies.
Besides yours, every other business on earth as well. It would be the ’90s all over again, when windshields get covered in fliers. On a positive note, at least we still have the Internet, so producing digital ads is still possible. You’d just have fewer platforms to use.
And because print ads will become the norm again, your costs will increase. Going paperless may not be a sound strategy anymore— unless we develop a technology that shows ads to people’s mobile devices without social media.
Thankfully, social media isn’t going anywhere, so businesses have nothing to worry about. Its culture and norms may change, but you can rest assured that the changes will be progressive.
