How Coronavirus Changes Social Media [In Terms Of Strategy And Messaging]
Change is imminent, we know that. Yet when it happens, and especially when it’s an abrupt change, it can sometimes find us off guard.
You may think that Coronavirus (or COVID-19 to be more precise) is the worst change we’re experiencing in years, and you would be right. People all over the globe struggle and feel hopeless.
The governments globally are trying to come up with strategies, businesses are trying to discover where to go from here, employees all over the world wondering if they’ll still have a job tomorrow, individuals struggling to keep their sanity. And the list could continue.
But let’s address a concern that’s on everyone’s mind, besides the terrible health issues, losses of human lives and chaos this virus has created. It’s all terrible, however, whether we want it or not, life continues, and we need to find ways to cope with whatever comes next.
What comes next for small and medium businesses though?
What comes next for their employees?
What comes next for their clients?
Changing times call for changing marketing strategies
In times of crisis, companies must rethink their strategies in order to keep their heads above the water and continue their growth against all struggles, chaos, and fear. Managers need to become good leaders, forerunners and make wise decisions when it comes to their organization and even when it comes to their marketing strategies.
Can you continue with the same strategy you thought would be successful at the beginning of this year? Hard to tell, as all businesses are different, but most likely the short answer is ‘no’.
The question is: can you talk to a person who’s been through a tough, life-threatening situation, the same way as before? Should you act as if nothing has happened, or should you adapt to the new situation?
You should definitely adapt to the new situation. How? Change your marketing strategy.
You may want to pull back on heavy ads focused on conversion and adjust your messaging for these uncertain times while trying to think about how your consumers will behave. Invest in brand affinity and be aware that this is something that takes time, it’s a process, as developing brand affinity requires investing time and resources in order to build your company branding and customer loyalty.
Why does brand affinity help?
Brand affinity is powerful because it has to do with creating a strong connection between a business and its customers (both B2C and B2B). Basically, brand affinity ensures that buyers remain emotionally invested in a company because they believe it shares their personal values.
And this, in turn, keeps them committed for the long term. Even in times of crisis like now.
Strategies for business in the Covid-19 age
Businesses around the world may experience different situations due to this virus that keeps us all captive in our houses. Some may be affected negatively, some mildly affected and may struggle on some levels, and there will also be those that are ‘positively’ affected if we can use this term in this context.
Here are some strategies that may help your business discover the best approach in these times of crisis.
1. Negatively affected businesses
If your business is in a bad situation due to being affected by the Covid-19, most probably you are thinking of shutting everything down altogether. And it’s totally understandable.
However, consider the following: you can still opt to stay in touch with your customers (audience), show them you care regardless of the heavy situation you’re going through, educate them towards solidarity, resilience, empathy — simply stay authentic and transparent with what you are going through as a business.
How? Through social media.
Why? Because this situation will be over eventually, and you might be able to start over, but where will your customers be? It’s always easier to reshape then to rebuild from scratch. And that’s valid when it comes to building customer relationships, too.
What you can do is to address things in a realistic way, try to stay positive and look forward to the future. Plan, educate, stay in touch with your customers, create (keep) trust and loyalty — keep your social presence even through this difficult time.
In the meantime try to discover ways that might help you recover from this shutdown, reconsider, find new ways of functionality for the future. Maybe you can sell vouchers that can be redeemed once the crisis has been averted. Maybe you can switch to online while testing out different ways to deliver value.
Or maybe even your audience will inspire you to pick a direction if you stay in touch with them at least on your social platforms. Ask them how they see the future of your industry — keep open communication.
Great things can be birthed from this crisis (even if everything looks horrific at this point), we need to be able to look beyond it and find ways to make things happen.
Remember that saying: When you are going through hell, keep walking — don’t stop for a chat, keep moving until you see the light… hope.
2. Mildly affected businesses
Hopefully, most companies will fall under this bucket. You get a hit but you bounce back.
Find the best ways you can do that — discover how others in your situation did it. Stay close to your online community, your customers, as you can easily still do that.
Digital communication will just increase from here on, which means you need to stay online and invest in the online even more than before. By keeping close to your customers, you’ll be able to recover faster and continue your business in normal circumstances as soon as the lockdown is over.
Don’t abandon your customers when things get harder, they might not be there once you get back fully on track.
However, show empathy towards the negatively affected businesses, show solidarity, be there for them and express your solidarity even on social media.
Reassure your clients that everything will be fine in the end, different but ok. Adapting to changes may even bring the best out of a business in the long-run. So keep the positivity and be aware of what your business can learn from this.
3. Positively affected businesses
If you are in this situation, be grateful. Show empathy towards others who are less fortunate and find a way to help them.
Consider creating a campaign (it doesn’t have to be huge) of helping very affected companies in any way possible — this would show genuine care and highlight the human side of your brand.
The best marketing strategy of a brand has always been and always will be human-centered marketing.
Assure your clients that business is going well, and you are there for them just like before and even more.
The bottom line for any situation you are in, as a business, is that turning to digital is the clear path towards staying connected with customers in all industries. You need to create a solid social presence and build strong connections with your customers today more than ever.
Different times call for different messaging
Consider the state of mind of your audience. While this is always the case, now this aspect becomes even more important.
When anxiety, stress, hopelessness, and chaos are the regular state of mind these days, people perceive messages in a different way than before. This means you need to adapt your voice and tone on Social Media according to the situation people are facing.
People are still hanging out online, maybe even more than before, which means you have an audience, you just need to understand and learn the best ways to communicate with them.
Struggling times call for more Empathy
Empathy marketing is a must-use strategy, now more than ever. The ability to understand and share the feelings of another person — feeling what your client is feeling right now is imperative.
Why? Because empathy is an integral part of how we connect to people.
Empathy-based marketing is about walking in your customer’s shoes to understand their experience in the world we live in today, and how you can better help them get what they want and need.
So, make sure to move away from the marketing-centric strategy to customer-centric strategy and speak to your customer’s motivations and from their perspective. This was a valid and fantastic approach up until now, too, but now it seems that empathy-based marketing might just turn out to be the only way the pieces can fall into place.
Try this approach and you’ll learn the effectiveness of caring about your customers soon enough.
Even if you are on the way to be out of business, stay in touch with your customers on Social Media, keep connected, educate them, keep the conversations alive, show them you care and you are grateful to have them.
This situation will pass eventually, and those who stick together will be the ones to make it — and they might just be able to recover, bounce back and continue.
You may need to redefine things in your business, you may need to change direction, but you already have a community of people who trust your business. Don’t abandon them, at least keep the social connection. Talk to them, be transparent and open — let them see the human side of your business, of your brand. If you empathize with them, they might empathize with you, too.
It’s time to focus more on how to connect with customers rather than on how to convert them.
How should you change your Social Media presence?
People are now more focused and interested in businesses that provide for their basic needs — food, hygiene, and medicine. So how could you possibly compete with that?
You can’t. But what you can do is be there, keep your presence and stay connected with your customers even if they aren’t buying from you at the usual rate, or worse, they aren’t buying at all.
While the first instinct would be to shut down all your accounts, don’t. Your loyal customers need to hear from you, need to be able to see you and ‘hear’ from you. So make sure you share information, stories they can relate to.
The types of content you need to focus on now are the educational type of content, storytelling (tell them personal stories, share your brand values, your hopes). In short, invest in trust content.
Spend more time on creating meaningful content and share meaningful moments with your audience. This will help with building trust in your brand. And people need trustworthy places to hang out nowadays. So be genuine and human. Nobody is interested in just being impressed right now.
Consider creating long-form valuable articles, videos, podcasts, essays, training content, and anything that would be helpful to your audience.
How to address clients
Your best shot is to be open, transparent, genuine and helpful. Chaos calls for peace and stability. Address the issue, but reassure.
Use this time to educate your audience — talk to them about topics such as solidarity, perseverance, resiliency, agility, personal development, cultivating positive feelings, etc.
Social listening is very important — monitor your customers’ conversations and be aware of what they need and how are your customers, employees, and community talking about the crisis.
Why? Because the types of conversations they have are different during a crisis.
Create a Crisis FAQ list which should include the following:
- Acknowledgment of the crisis
- Details about how and if it affects your company long-term
- Insights into how the company is taking it
- What are the specific actions being taken in response
- Real or potential effects
- Steps that were taken to prevent future occurrence
Be available to answer questions on social media — as people stay more on social media, the support is also moving mostly online.
Use visuals and graphics along with words to inform your audience — a picture is worth a thousand words, and we can now use pictures even more so to share hope and positive emotions.
Additionally, be aware that there are three approaches you can opt for to address your clients on social:
1. Don’t mention Coronavirus (not truly a valid option)
In my opinion, this shouldn’t really be an option at all, because you simply can’t ignore the reality we are facing right now.
By not addressing it, you’ll simply look shallow and cold. Maybe even ignorant.
However, if you don’t know what to say, or you don’t know how to address it the right way, keep it simple and positive and say something like:
“Times are difficult and changing, but we are here for you. Let’s stay safe and go through this chaos together”.
2. Acknowledge Coronavirus (likely the best approach)
Acknowledging the situation is the best approach.
But then you can’t keep focusing only on the crisis and negativity, yet you can’t ignore it either. This means you need a new strategy and approach that is proper and comes to meet the needs of the people in the current situation and for the future based on how the situation changes.
3. Lean into Coronavirus (can work for some)
Leaning into it does not mean you focus only on this terrible situation we are all facing, it also means you come with a solution, whether it’s in the form of encouragement, empathy, showing the success of others in similar situations in history, etc.
Your product or service might even be something that can help many people in these hard times.
Try to keep the positivity and hope in your messages, even if you stay grounded in reality.
How to change your content
When times change as they do now, you need to be able to change the way you communicate, too. This means that you need to adapt your content to the current needs and wants of your target audience.
So here are some content types and ideas to consider sharing with your audience and implementing in your content strategy in the next period of time:
- Write inspirational, encouraging articles that are grounded in reality.
- Write social media posts that are encouraging to your audience even if they are related to your industry or business.
- Write social media posts that highlight also the benefits of this crisis (create a series).
- Share articles or write posts about similar situations in history and emphasize how others have succeeded and made things work again.
- Post information about general best practices in crisis situations like this, and best practices that are specific to your industry.
- Create thought leadership type of posts and share them with your audience — find relevant topics for the situation we are dealing with globally, but also about interesting topics specific to your industry. These can be a longer type of posts that can educate your audience and keep the conversation going.
- Write articles or social media posts about personal experiences or solidarity — especially positive ones could go a long way — encouraging storytelling is something people need right now.
- You can still market your products/services but in a different way, especially if your business is part of the industries that are negatively affected right now — like traveling, tourism, restaurants, schools, beauty salons, gym centers, etc.
What you can do here is to educate your audience about your industry, write updates, stay in touch, share how your business is doing, share what your staff is doing, share future plans and hopes.
For example, if you are a traveling agency, instead of writing about your offers, and destinations people can visit (that’s not an option anymore), you could inspire them to make plans to visit their dream destinations when this is all over. Or ask them to share their experiences in certain destinations, where they were planning to have their vacation and why. This way you can inspire them to dream and plan, look forward to the future.
Be careful not to end up salesy though, keep things clean and appeal to the human side of your business. People whose basic needs are now limited to food and medicine, need inspiration and motivation, not ‘unnecessary’ things shoved down their throat.
- Share posts about possible indoor activities your audience could opt for like learning — there’s a great opportunity to learn to master some of the skills they may have postponed, watch webinars, watch online courses/training.
- Write posts and articles about how working remotely will impact the work that we do today, productivity, the way we communicate, how the relationship with our clients change, etc.
- Write posts and articles about self-care, mental health, empathy, about the benefits of caring for others, how to invest in yourself and in relationships in times of crisis, etc.
- Educate your audience about the importance of keeping in touch with their family, peers, and colleagues at work — it can be through longer thought leadership type of posts, quotes, questions and explanations, curated content, articles.
- Educate your audience about tools they could use for online communication.
- Address Myths & Fake news through social media posts.
- Create infographics about several topics.
- Write articles and social media posts and touch upon predictions regarding how the economy, your industry, or humans will evolve due to the Covid-19 situation.
- Push for more digital in the digital era — talk about the ways it’ll evolve and the positive parts of it. Explain in posts, videos, articles about how we can still be together even if it’s online — nothing can stop togetherness, care, community.
Move everything online: traveling (visit places and destinations online and learn everything about it), gym (more online videos on how to work out at home, have live classes with your customers), schooling (videos and platforms to educate students, e-learning is an excellent way to carry on with your classes), beauty salons (tips to care for your hair, skin, nails, body at home), restaurants (videos about tips to prepare your favorite dish or dessert at home, webinars, online classes to become a chef), etc. You get the point.
Basically, anything you can think of can be moved online by creating: educational content, videos, social media posts, articles, podcasts, webinars, online classes.
The bottom line is that it’s extremely important to empathize and put yourself in your customer’s shoes (it shouldn’t be that hard, you are in their situation already — the entire world is affected and you are part of it).
Don’t write anything you wouldn’t want to read about if you were them. Choose your words wisely, don’t be patronizing, or mocking, or negative, but being overly positive about it won’t help either.
Stay balanced in your communication, grounded in reality, yet hopeful.
Stay online and get inspired on how you could move your entire business online.
How to address your employees
It’s obvious by now that Covid-19 means more employees working from home.
While in most professions this isn’t something feasible, however in many of them, it can work just fine. So, if you hired someone to do a job now is the time to trust them to get it done regardless of where they are working. Digital tools allow us to work from anywhere and the future lies in flexible work patterns.
But this isn’t the only thing that may change. Unfortunately, there’s another question that may arise: what to do if your business is really struggling?
In case your business is really struggling, the best recommendation would be to sit down and openly talk to your employees and see if you can all figure out a solution together. Share the situation with everybody, show them the numbers (how much money is coming in and going out), and engage them in finding a solution. Maybe you can find a solution that wouldn’t be as drastic as closing down your business.
In times like this, train your team (if you haven’t already) to stick together, show them you care about them, and if it’s the case, try to find a solution that would involve them all suffering a little for a shorter period of time rather than anyone should have to suffer a lot in the long-run.
Also, if your team is remote, make sure to check in with each other on a regular basis — virtual doesn’t have to mean impersonal. Show your employees that you care about them and teach them to do the same with each other.
Change and crisis do not have to end your business and destroy you. Hang in there…
Such crises have been around before in history, and this situation is probably not the last one humanity goes through either. However, we can learn from each challenge and become stronger.
But until then we need to find ways that would help us manage things well, so here are a few suggestions to help you in the process:
Persevere in personal projects
A crisis can mess up the wellbeing of our daily life and questions everything we do or think about. However, if we continue to plan and hope for the future we will feel less vulnerable regarding what will happen to us in the near future.
Develop personal and professional goals, and continue to pursue your objectives.
Practice self-discipline
Get offline and do some work-out. Invest in offline activities that recharge you. Read more. All in the safety of your home.
Stay updated but don’t feed on news and negativity. Continue to have rules and boundaries and at the end of the day you’ll have that feeling of control and efficiency you actually need to carry on — you’ll experience emotional balance.
Look at difficult situations as a good training program
While a crisis can bring out the worst in people, it can also be a great chance for personal development and discover what we truly believe in and what our values are. A difficult situation can be your best trainer.
Practice solidarity
Practicing solidarity can save us. Focusing on others and not on our own misery can help us get out of our obsessive self-protection state and become willing to help others overcome their struggles. Practicing care for others is the greatest form of solidarity.
Stay positive
The feeling of positivity can be drawn from being able to focus on your personal projects, practicing self-discipline and focusing on our values and helping others.
However, there are many other ways that can contribute to your overall well-being in these Covid-19 times: catch up on your reading, enjoy family time and the coziness of your home, enjoy the slowing down in a fast-paced world, be grateful for your family and friends, for the Springtime, your favorite coffee. Small things, yet so precious.
Remember this, what you learn in the valley (when things are hard, uncertain, hopeless) will be helpful on the mountain (when you are successful and hopeful).
So handle things well when there’s fear and chaos around you, this too shall pass.
Take care of yourselves, your loved ones, and your community. 🌱
Stay safe.
