Critical Thinking

A month ago, you were hired to replace the previous social media officer of a small organisation that produces, customises and delivers beauty kits and cosmetics.

Apparently, your organisation is losing traction on social media and experiences much lower feedbacks and engagement rate than expected. This negative trend is not new to them, but the causes are not known yet…since few years now, it seems difficult for them to grow their online public – and most importantly – the conversion from promo banner(s) to online shop.

Your supervisor points out that the digital market represents for them a big opportunity to which they wish to capitalise on. She/he confesses you that, so far, they lacked of a robust social media strategy: an alternative might be outsourcing the function to an external provider of digital services, but they much better prefer to nurture internally this competence and expertise.

You are tasked to design and plan the next social media campaign for the incoming year, and detailing:

  • Goals
  • Audience profile
  • Monitoring means
  • Competitive analysis
  • Audit measures and parameters
  • Networks to cover
  • Etc…

However, you realise very soon to have a bigger issue to deal with first: due to the overall lack of a structured social media strategy, you miss most of the historic data, meaning: comprehensive and detailed information of what has been done so far).


A month ago, you were hired to replace the previous social media officer of a small organisation that produces, customises and delivers beauty kits and cosmetics.

Apparently, your organisation is losing traction on social media and experiences much lower feedbacks and engagement rate than expected. This negative trend is not new to them, but the causes are not known yet…since few years now, it seems difficult for them to grow their online public – and most importantly – the conversion from promo banner(s) to online shop.

Your supervisor points out that the digital market represents for them a big opportunity to which they wish to capitalise on. She/he confesses you that, so far, they lacked of a robust social media strategy: an alternative might be outsourcing the function to an external provider of digital services, but they much better prefer to nurture internally this competence and expertise.

You are tasked to design and plan the next social media campaign for the incoming year, and detailing:

  • Goals
  • Audience profile
  • Monitoring means
  • Competitive analysis
  • Audit measures and parameters
  • Networks to cover
  • Etc…

However, you realise very soon to have a bigger issue to deal with first: due to the overall lack of a structured social media strategy, you miss most of the historic data, meaning: comprehensive and detailed information of what has been done so far).


How would you react?





You put on hold the draft and development of the new social media campaign to focus on criticalities underestimated or completely overlooked by the person previously in charge of your role. But where should you start investigating?





The analysis of the competitors is quite a time consuming activity, and time is a limited resource for you at the moment. You need to “focus your focus” on few essential indicators that might explain such gap in (social media) performance. Which one would you choose…





You know that you share with your competitors the same market segment – young women from 17 to 28 y/o – but they approach to this public through completely different media. While your brand is still committed to LinkedIn and Facebook, your competitors moved on Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok – which makes much more sense given the general demographics of these platforms and the use that people make of them, compared to the aging population of Facebook. So now that you know you need to switch arena, what comes next?





Based on this preliminary and quick benchmark analysis, you finally have first indicative insights to work on your report. The first main issue is clearly related to a mismatch between your brand, the communication channels and the digital environment target. How would you pinpoint the very first recommendation?






Congratulations, you win!