Through our ongoing conversations with marketers, we’re picking up on an emerging trend——many brands are hitting a sophomore social media stall.  They’ve established a presence on the major social media platforms.  They’ve plucked all of the low-hanging follower fruit, and it’s gotten tough to sustain growth in the friend/follower network.  For these brands, the social media honeymoon is over.

It begs several questions: how can you avoid a social stall?  If you’re already in one, how can you shake it?

Having now worked with over 400 companies through MLC’s social media maturity diagnostic, here’s our theory: brands hit social stall points because they are using social media primarily to reinforce the existing ways they create value.

They treat their blog as a PR wire.  They splash their latest IMC initiative on a special Facebook tab.  They set up a few service personnel to solve service issues via Twitter. All of these are simply repeating activities brands already do, only in social media channels.  That’s a recipe for a sophomore stall.

By contrast, brands that avoid stall seem to have made strategic bets in areas where social creates new-in-kind value for customers.  Here are some of my favorite examples:

• American Express Open Forum —small business owners help each other on topics extending well beyond financial services.
• Nike+ –runners provide one another with everything from emotional support to injury management advice to favorite local running routes.
• Texas Instruments’ E2E community —engineers help one another solve technical challenges, whether related to TI’s products or not.
• PricewaterhouseCoopers’ LinkedIn execution—though early days (read about it in the WSJ here), this is a promising approach by PwC to provide college graduates with highly customized job search advice via LinkedIn.

Note how most of the value (on the order of 70%+ of total new value created) in these examples accrues to customers, not the brand!  Skewing the value proposition so heavily in favor of consumers is crucial to breaking through the sophomore stall zone.  It ensures users will come back to your brand’s network presence time after time, and it makes it easy for early users to pull in their peers via word-of-mouth (“you’ve got to see this!”).

So, if you feel like you’re in danger of a social media stall, ask yourself these questions:

• What percent of all your social efforts reinforce existing value vs. create new-in-kind value?  If 50% or more is on reinforcing existing value, you need to rethink.

• For your social efforts that may be creating new-in-kind value, how much of that value accrues to consumers (vs. the brand)?  If you answer anything less than 70%, revisit your social value proposition so that your efforts are more in service to the consumer.

In my post next week, I’ll discuss how to spot opportunities for your brand to create new-in-kind value through social efforts.

MLC members, if you haven’t taken the social media maturity diagnostic, learn more about it here, and then contact your account manager to take it.  It’s included in your membership! For more help in thinking through your social media strategy, tap into our social media strategy builder.

Related posts:

1. Embed in Routines to Drive Business Results with Social
2. Social Media in ‘Unsocial’ Industries
3. Eating the Social Media Ratings Dogfood
4. Global Social Media Capabilities: One Size Doesn’t Fit All
5. The Social Media Mistake You Don’t Know You’re Making