The “Social Innovation” Bug
With social channels offering a platform to identify, entice, engage audience, maintain & run businesses harmoniously what's the future of websites? Have you been smitten by the social innovation bug?
Talk of the late 90s or the early 2000s and most of them who lived / survived through that time would instantly remember the DOTCOM revolution. The number of VCs lining these companies up with funds in the order of millions of dollars saw a meteoric rise in the 2000s.
📊 “5000+ funding deals materializing between 1999 & 2000 according to the graph here"
And then came a sharp drop-off via the infamous DOTCOM bubble where organizations started going bust, running out of daily active users perhaps, facing tremendous challenges to stay afloat. There is no doubt that phase may have been pretty tough for everyone involved, but what it brought by with it was more than clearer a direction in which the market would head thereon, a new way to perceive business workflows moving them from what they were earlier, to paving the way towards what is it largely known today as – an online marketplace / eCommerce.
Over the last decade the online channels have only boomed multifold taking the legacy ahead from what they were in the 2000s, with Covid only pronouncing it all the more. The advent & the rise of social channels owing to almost every person in the world possessing / using a smartphone led to another wave of evolution that’s pretty evident today.
📈 “Facebook, YouTube & WhatsApp - the top 3 channels amount to 5 billion DAU is something one can’t afford to condone”
So, it wouldn’t altogether be wrong to claim that the world indeed has pivoted on these social channels for a large percentage of the 5 billion users seem to spend an average of 2 hours per day on these platforms, a social uprising of sorts.
“The only thing constant in the world is a change & going by the theory of evolution, one ought to be able to mold oneself, adapt & fit in by factoring all crucial environmental changes sans which one may stare at a fallout eventually”
Pivot on Social
Given the popularity of these social channels today providing an easy means to reach out & connect with millions of people it won’t altogether be wrong to say that we have reached a stage where businesses can reach the zenith of success by pinning on these platforms, using them to their effective advantage, which weren’t deemed all that straightforward back in the day.
Let’s just compare the workflow and understand where we stand today as opposed to how things got done earlier getting a hang of the evolution rampant in the space.
Conventional business set-up!
How did businesses function over a conventional set-up? Here are a few steps describing the workflow:
STEP 1: Legal
It obviously started with a registration, a brand name under which one is looking to operate. This was usually done through the government affiliated sites or chartered accountants with all the statutory compliances and norms.
STEP 2: Domain
Parallelly / post that one would get into the registration of a domain name as an offshoot of the physical business operative at a location so as to enable an online presence.
STEP 3: Website
Think about designing a website / hire someone who offers that as a professional service and get the whole platform up and running, not to mention the pathbreaking changes that have occurred over the last decade as for the technology front.
STEP 4: Marketing
Look to build enticing content to promote the business and that could mean building physical content like pamphlets, printed media / banner advertisements to taking keywords on Google Ads trying to exploit page ranking algorithm employing SEO to rank higher & maintain that position.
STEP 5: Conversions
A shadow of a percentage of them who see those Ads would then convert leading to a sign-up which obviously represents the ToFu as for the Sales channels & then further leading to retention when they keep paying up landing on the website & using the product / service regularly.
This tweet here happens to be the stub that laid something of a foundation-stone for this article:
With the world today becoming mostly content-driven the focus for businesses is on dishing out some great content as deemed relevant by the target audience helping them understand the value proposition clearly and making it feasible for them to onboard & sign-up for the product / service.
Let’s now go over the steps to the workflow that’s rampant across businesses hinging entirely on social channels today.
The Social Uprising
What’s happening with the business workflow today and how the landscape seems to have changed from being website-fronted to social-network-fronted is just mesmerizing to say in the least. Here are a few steps to it:
Step 1: Online Presence
As of today, it all starts off with creating an online presence over some social fronted page(s) which may spread across Facebook, Twitter (X), LinkedIn & Instagram. If one is too particular of a brand name and is looking to maintain an image they may look at brand name registration as an additional step in getting bootstrapped towards a launch.
Step 2: Content (Build & Launch)
Given how most of the audience have a presence on either one of these social channels mentioned above, it becomes easy to build content that resonates with the target audience and this is where the creativity takes over. Cracking the code here would look like you going from talking about your product / service to highlighting the value clearly and ensuring that users reach an understanding & getting to the WoW moment ASAP.
Step 3: Marketing / Boosting
Some businesses may choose to boost the content if need be from time to time. Also, the fact that these social channels offer a ton of paid campaign options by defining clear goals makes it pretty clear for a business to define the exact purpose of the exercise (or) the outcome they are gunning for, which could vary from improving visibility / engagement / sign-ups / revenue via paying users.
Step 4: Conversion
Owing to how the platform where the marketing content is showcased and the sign-up for the product / service remains the same, the conversion could be pretty straightforward and also immediate, spilling the beans on the success / failure in an instant. Given how a good marketing strategy brings some bit of repetition, there may not be much room for the audience to indecisively sit on the fence as it would enforce them to choose sides, so one is either IN or OUT.
NOTE 1: Talking of websites, one can't really ignore the fact that they also needed marketing which simply means that one ought to build relevant content targeting a social networking platform (say Facebook / Instagram) to showcase the value the products could add and then embed proper CTAs in there to lead them & draw them onward to the website.
NOTE 2: The ToFu numbers as opposed to the percentage of conversion could be a meagre single digit (between 5 – 7 if one is damn lucky) owing to the logistic architecture that needs one to sift between platforms to watch visuals, click at the right place, land on another website, scroll to the relevant section, ultimately leading to a sign-up.
The Verdict
📉 That’s saving a whopping 66% of time in pivoting & going social-first intern drastically reducing TTM (Time-to-Market) thereof
A schedule of 146 days [103 - regular schedule + 43 - overruns] for businesses getting set-up the conventional way as opposed to 47 days [31 - regular schedule + 16 - overruns]
NOTE: Although the no. of days estimated over social uprising here is 47, please beware that it could the maximum lead time, the least could be 1 day or even 1 hour if the content happens to catch on.
So, if this idea sticks one could perhaps think about eliminating the website entirely. I know you are rolling your eyeballs as you read this as you are beginning to think, “maybe that’s too farfetched an idea”. But think back to 2 decades earlier & you realize how one may have encountered similar reactions when they heard of businesses moving from storefronts to online channels like an eCommerce website when the idea of pivoting on the web came into being.
So, one may just have to give some thoughts the TIME to sink in and materialize. But yes, the SEED has been sown.