COVID-19 Playbooks for Businesses from Google, Facebook, LinkedIn & Instagram
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To help businesses navigate through the coronavirus pandemic, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram have released comprehensive guides on how companies can continue to reach and serve customers, deal with disruptions, and adjust their business strategies.
Google’s COVID-19 guide for businesses—called Navigating the road ahead: A guide to help businesses adapt their digital marketing strategies and prepare for what’s next—includes an overview of how the pandemic has altered consumers’ expectations, habits, and purchasing behavior, and describes the three steps all businesses need to take as they work toward recovery.
- Respond: Respond quickly to customer needs and solve the problems that matter today.
- Rebuild: Plan for the future by rebuilding marketing fundamentals including deeper insights, tools, and measurement.
- Recover: Reframe business models and rethink digital marketing strategy and practices to restart, maintain, or increase growth.
The guide includes insights on how changing consumer dynamics have affected businesses, and provides guidance on how to shift digital marketing strategies to meet customer needs during each stage.
For more information and to download the full Google COVID-19 Playbook, visit Think with Google.
Facebook has created several guides for different industries, including restaurants and cafés, retail, salons and spas, fitness and recreation centers, marketing agencies, and media and publishers. Each guide provides tips on how each business type can use Facebook to adapt and respond to changing environments.
Tips include how to best use the platform to share updates and answer customer questions, how to find and share information to keep employees safe and informed, and examples and inspiration from other brands in the industry.
In addition to general tips, Facebook has also published a 67-page guide on ways to use Facebook to help people stay connected during the COVID-19 pandemic.
While the guide is intended for media companies, most of the information it contains is relevant to other businesses as well, including tips on how to create meaningful content, tools and features to reach the right audience, and how to use live video to create virtual events.
For more information, visit Facebook’s COVID-19 Resources page or download Facebook’s Global Coronavirus Resource on Facebook's COVID-19 Information Hub for Media.
LinkedIn offers several guides to help businesses during the pandemic, including a guide to developing content for LinkedIn, which includes user insights, trending hashtags, and data on how different industries are talking about coronavirus in their updates.
The guide also includes three steps brands should be taking right now:
- Managing employees through change by highlighting culture, focusing on productivity, and encouraging learning and education.
- Leading with trust by demonstrating reliability, transparency, and corporate responsibility.
- Adapting to drive business continuity by focusing on customer needs, building a sense of connectedness in the customer community, and sharing a step-by-step plan to address business challenges.
For more information, visit LinkedIn’s Coronavirus Resource Hub.
Instagram’s COVID-19 Playbook provides information on creative ways for businesses to stay relevant and help customers by engaging and communicating with their Instagram audience.
In addition to general guidelines for social posts during the pandemic, Instagram’s guide offers tips for engaging and entertaining customers with interactive experiences like hosting virtual events with Instagram Live, enhancing online shopping with expanded delivery options, posting long-form content to educate and entertain, and sharing important news about your business and how it has been affected by COVID-19.
For more information, see the full Instagram for Business COVID-19 Playbook.