What is a S.W.O.T Team
Working in Social Media Management means having a way to efficiently and effectively monitor how the socials for your brand are faring out. It means creating goals that push your brand in directions that allow for growth. In order for your team to do that or even to make attainable goals, you must first have a thorough knowledge of internal and external factors that impact your business.
One way that many find works best for them is the S.W.O.T method. In knowing a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, a marketing team is then able to evaluate internal and external factors that can potentially allow their brand to grow.
As Previously stated, the S in S.W.O.T stands for strengths. This means examining factors that give an edge to your brand. These are things such as location, or well known brand. Things that work well for your brand and that you want to identify and capitalize on. You’ll want to ask yourself and your team questions like, “What do you do well? What unique resources do you draw upon”(MindTools) to help you come up with an accurate answer for the strengths category.
The W in S.W.O.T stands for weaknesses. These could be defined as any factors that are harmful and can be used against you. As the video pointed out, another way to look at this category is that these are areas in which we can invest in. You’ll want to ask questions like, “Where can you improve? Where do we have fewer resources?”(MindTools)
Continuing on, the O in S.W.O.T stands for opportunities. Your opportunities are favorable situations that can bring about competitive advantage. You’ll want to ask your team questions such as “ What trends could you be taking advantage of” (MindTools) This category, as well as the next takes into account what your competition is doing, and the industry your company is in. It set you up to place goals for your team
Lastly, the T in S.W.O.T stands for threats. These are very important to identify. It is also helpful to your team to ask yourself the question, “what threats do our weaknesses expose you to?” (MindTools) Doing so will help your team prioritize immediate threats and those that might take more time to suss out.
In both your strengths and your weaknesses category, the results lend you to identify internal positives and negatives within your brand. You can use things such as customer and employee feedback to help gauge what these could possibly be! The “opportunities and Threats” categories identify external factors that you can respond to and that will help decide what your next steps could be.
It should be noted that there are other methods of evaluating and collecting information that pertains to your business. Please note the diagram for P.E.S.T below.
The S.W.O.T method seems to be the one most choose to use. For the reason that is covers a broad range of topic in a way that is very simple and clear. When choosing your tools, it is more efficient to choose what is the most simple and branch upon that. This method allows teams to be realistic about where their company is currently, while still identifying future goals and allowing for future analysis.
A few downsides to this method is that teams can find themselves making excessive lists, and from those lists not being able to identify which factors should then take priority. This method can be very broad, which leads to a non-specific approach when attempting to resolve problems that arise. For instance, if I were to list “location” as a weakness of the company, without specifying the reason location is a weakness, my attempt to combat it might not actually help my brand. Even more so, my assessment of our weakness is completely opinionated. I wouldn’t have any real proof outside of surveys, that might corroborate my opinion, but even those are opinions.
While the S.W.O.T method has its own weaknesses and threats, it’s strengths lie in ability to develop ideas. To which, this method turns those ideas into goals for your brand, which creates more opportunity. Overall, any method that increases your audience’s experience with your brand is a positive, and moving forward I would say the S.W.O.T. method opens your company up to that possibility.
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