The SWOT Analysis & its benefits
When you’re looking at your company and are trying to figure out a new social media strategy, you have to assess the current position it is in to move forward successfully. You need to ask yourself what is the direction you want to go, and the path needed to get there. From this, you have to figure out what you may need to change and what’s working well for you. The SWOT Analysis is the perfect set up when you’re planning a new strategy because it answers the questions you need to know in order to make decisions that lead to your strategy. It is a compilation of your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and its primary objective is to help organizations develop a full awareness of all the factors involved in making a business decision (Schooley, 2019).
Once you break up these factors, you can use them to discover recommendations and strategies by leveraging what you found to be your strengths and opportunities. You can also plan to make plans on how you can use your strategy to overcome your threats and weaknesses. This way the strategy you come up with will aim at setting you apart from competitors and help you succeed in achieving your main KPIs. This process is something that brands should do every so often to keep their strategies in line with how they’re business is doing to make changes and adjust accordingly. Because of this, it can become one of the most useful tools for business owners to start and grow their companies on social media and beyond (Schooley, 2019).
The Harvard Business Review has an interesting way to dissect your SWOT analysis in order for you to see all sides of it and understand how one aspect of it can relate to the other. According to them, the downside of traditional SWOT is that it doesn’t account for the more dynamic forces at work in business (Brandenburger, 2019). It states that in order to get the true benefits from a SWOT analysis during the planning process of a strategy is to reconstruct it as you can see in the image to the left. The framework recognizes that threats and opportunities can come from within as well as from without because you have to account for outside factors and not just your own internal deficiencies and capabilities. This leads to companies having to examine two additional factors when conducting their SWOT Analysis: others’ strengths and others’ weaknesses. This debunked process also acknowledges that companies need to analyze their strengths and how they may pose a threat to it, while at times its weaknesses may present opportunities (Brandenburger, 2019). When structuring your strategy, looking at your SWOT this way can help you focus on the key points you need to drive through your social content in order to set your company apart from its competitors. It also helps you focus on who is your target market and how they play an essential part in this process. When starting to plan for your social media strategy your target audience should be the main focus in everything you build around the SWOT Analysis. You may ask, why are they? They are ultimately the ones that will determine if your strategy works since they will be the ones purchasing your product or service. Your companies social media KPIs are driven by the users that are served your content and take actions against it. So when you're in the process of a SWOT Analysis, and you determine the companies threats and opportunities, you have to also consider how your target market comes into play to that.
This is why I believe the Harvard Business Review’s reconstructed SWOT because you have to consider how the opportunities you find can be taken advantage of to best suit your target audience since they are your consumers and are the ones who get you the results. It aligns also with the threats you may see within your company internally, you need to account for the outside factors and how your target audience comes into effect. Once you figure out all these steps int the planning process, you should be able to swiftly come up with a social strategy that will help your company thrive on the platforms and achieve its goals. Planning and research are the basis for any structure when coming up with a strategy. With it, you can make adjustments as you go and continue to create content that will best help your brand succeed.
Brandenburger, A. (2019, September 10). Are Your Company’s Strengths Really Weaknesses? Retrieved September 27, 2020, from https://hbr.org/2019/08/are-your-companys-strengths-really-weaknesses
Schooley, S. (2019, June 23). SWOT Analysis: Definition and Examples. Retrieved September 27, 2020, from https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/4245-swot-analysis.html
The Mind Tools Content Team By the Mind Tools Content Team, Team, T., Wrote, M., Wrote, H., & Wrote, D. (n.d.). SWOT Analysis: — How to Develop a Strategy For Success. Retrieved September 27, 2020, from https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_05.htm