Social media, influencing marketing and technical trends. These are the digital ecosystems that Patricia Bárcena knows perfectly. As Managing Director of SozialMas and CMO of Bárcena Formación, the Mallorcan is able to advise leading companies on the island, while at the same time succeeding in making her 71-year-old father viral in one of the social networks that are setting a trend.
Patricia Bárcena, in Mallorca Global.
Your father already has more than 222,000 followers on TikTok. How did you manage to catapult him to fame?
A year ago, I decided to digitalise the family business dedicated to training. One of the projects, the first one, was to show that you can create a good personal brand through social media. The guinea pig was my father. I put it on TikTok on 28 December and told him: in three months you will be on Antena 3. Today @aprende.mates has almost eighty mentions in media such as Antena 3, La Sexta… Even Cristina Pedroche has commented on his videos! This was something I planned to make a success story, along with the digitalisation of the whole Bárcena Formación Academy.
“The key to digitising a business is to proceed step by step”
What advice can you give them to consolidate their first steps?
That they are late … -laugh–. I would advise them to start step by step. There are enough tools available, adapted to each volume of business. Running a WhatsApp business channel, a Shopify store… These are solutions that will adapt your business to the online world, if not immediately, then in less than a week. In a state of alert, neighbourhood shops have already been digitised with a WhatsApp and a photo with prices. And then payment methods like Bizum, Stripe, Paypal… already enable immediate digitalisation. The key is to proceed step by step, to know the tools and to train them. Digitisation goes hand in hand with training.
How do you rate the digital level of companies in Mallorca?
I cannot generalise. Some are very groundbreaking, but there is still a lot to do. What I do know is that the business sector has a five-year plan that focuses on the digitisation of businesses. Because it is not something that is just passing through, it is here to stay.
“TikTok, messaging and selling on social networks will set a trend in 2021”
You have visited Silicon Valley several times to pick up on new trends.
The creation of a network in Silicon Valley, the cradle of social media, was important to me. I remember that I landed there in 2014 in a shared house. One day you were having breakfast and talking about Bitcoins, another day a colleague said he was with Mark Zuckerberg
What are the latest networks at the moment and how does 2021 look like in this sector?
Social media is a world that is changing more and more. And with the pandemic, digitisation and social media are advancing faster and faster, we spend more and more time on it. The big trend since the end of last year is TikTok, so the novelty is the introduction of this channel in the social media strategy. Another trend that is already coming from behind is messaging. You used to share on Facebook, Twitter etc. Now you think these messages are interesting for my cousin and you send them through WhatsApp. There is not so much public interaction, but people have sent them via Messenger, and that has just as much value or more. Finally, social selling or selling through social networks.
“In social networks we have to be innovative, but above all very human”
Mallorca is one of the most important international tourist destinations, but is there anything else you can do to promote it?
We are as far as possible at the top, but at the moment we are in a phase of development, so the solution is not to wait until the storm passes, but to adapt, keep moving and make sure that Mallorca arrives outside the island, albeit digitally. We must play with creativity and with humanity. In the networks and in the digital world, we must be innovative but above all very human. Now, with so much social distance, we are looking for humanity more than ever.
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