The honeycomb model

In this blog article, we wanted to take a look at some proven methods that help support your social media strategy. The honeycomb model is broken down into 7 sections that you can see clearly laid out below

We will look into how each of these categories affects your social media strategy and the importance of each group.

Identity

Identity is essentially what is says on the tin! Who are your audience? Literally, this involves things as basic as their name, age, gender and nationality. This can also extend into more detailed breakdowns of things like their interests, if they participate or have an interest in things like sports or other specific activities. These things are important to focus on when looking at our audiences because these things provide us leads and give us essential information around how we target our messaging to our audiences.

Conversations

Conversations can also be looked at as social listening. This means how much time and effort a company puts into ‘listening’ to their audiences online. So looking at reviews left by customers, comments they make to your socials and competitors socials. This also includes things like how many times people are sharing or not sharing your content, how many likes you get and just the general back and forth communication between your social accounts and your followers.

Sharing

Sharing is a key aspect of social media as it helps spread the word among individuals and groups that might not be directly connected but by sharing they can bridge this gap. It is also essential to see what your audiences are sharing because this also helps get a better understanding of their identity. People will tend to share things that they feel strongly about or that they think is core to them as a person and what they believe in/enjoy.

Presence

Presence can mean a few things. It can include literal presence across social media platforms as well as the frequency in which your company posts. It can be how present you are on your companies messaging through social, do you tend to respond immediately to enquiries or can this take up to a day or longer? This can also mean how much presence do they highlight in terms of physical presence. Do you share items with location tags to your office or where you are? This helps remind people that you have a physical presence as well as an online one. It helps humanise your business to the audience.

Relationships

Relationships focuses more on how your social users are related to each other. Are they all complete strangers from one another with a common interests or are they tendentially couples, other businesses in the same industry? This can be important in regards to how you structure your messaging and better understanding the kind of content your users want to see.

Reputation

This looks at things like how popular the social platform is, how many likes do you get on average? How many comments do you get on average per post? what are your reviews and ratings like? These all add to your reputation and the way that users interpret your reputation. This will also help with things such as conversions and sales because people want to have the impression they are getting quality. Reputation adds to the interpretation of this level of quality.

Groups

Groups refer to literal groups that make up communities and sub-communities of their own. These are key to identify in regards to groups that relate to yourself and your business. If you are not involved with these groups or lack a presence with them then you could be losing out on a large percentage of your potential audience. So a key thing to do in this regard is to research these groups and identify the key ones for your business and find a way to reach out to them also.

Conclusion

The Honeycomb Model is a useful basis on which to better understand how to adjust your social media strategy and what factors to look out for when defining your audience. It’s purpose is more that of creating a clear definition of how your business falls into each of the categories above and giving you an idea what things you can work on and what things are less relevant to you and your companies strategy.