How business and social goals were made in Chelsea

The announcement around the appointment of Chelsea’s new manager, Frank Lampard, was delayed last week due to outages on Facebook and Instagram.

Let’s think about that for a second. A Premier League football club put on hold plans to unveil their new manager, not because of contractual issues or to maximise the impact on share price, but because they couldn’t upload pictures and videos to two social media platforms.

How very 2019.

If there was any doubt as to the importance placed on social media by top level organisations and companies, stories like this help to banish it.

Yet outside of big marketing budgets, many organisations are struggling to bridge the gap between social media and wider organisational objectives.

The latest Sprout Social index shows that 51% of social marketing leaders identify their biggest challenge as developing social strategy to support business goals.

This is despite the fact that 90% agree that investing in social media has a direct impact on revenue.

The wide-ranging annual survey highlights that 31% of marketing leaders identify securing budget and resources as a key challenge.

This has a knock-on effect because it prevents them from doing strategic work to support the organisation. 59% say time prevents them from doing strategic work, while 45% say it’s other business priorities – both of which would be solved through increased resources allocated to social media.

Concluding, Sprout says: “Marketers understand the significance of social, but those outside of the marketing department continue to overlook how social can impact larger business objectives.”

Elsewhere, the report highlights that many social media practitioners see engagement as the most popular measure of success, with 63% citing it as important. This compares to 41% who see amplification metrics like reach and impressions as important, and 50% who cite conversions.

72% of respondents define engagement as likes or comments, while 62% see it is shares and/or retweets.

To achieve those likes and shares, social media posts needs to be ‘entertaining’ and ‘inspiring’. 

67% of consumers will ‘like’ and 55% of consumers will share entertaining posts, while the same figures for inspiring posts are 57% and 50%. They are also looking for posts that ‘teach’ or ‘tell a story’, more than they’re looking for discounts or sales information.

Looking ahead, video plays a key role in two trends to watch as seen by social media practitioners. 63% say live video will become more important, while 48% say the same of Instagram Stories. 

Both are no doubt under consideration in a certain west London suburb.