Just a few years ago, most companies’ social strategy was limited to a simple Facebook page cluttered with one-way promotional messages. Those days are gone. Customers are turning to social to help guide their buying decisions and inform their brand loyalty; in fact, nearly half of online users rely on social when making a purchase.
It is important to develop a social presence that effectively tells your brand’s story and engages with your key audience and customers. Here is a short list of tactics to implement that will help your company become more engaging.
1: Don’t develop strategy in a silo
Ensure that your social media efforts contribute to your bottom line by aligning your social strategy with the overarching goals of your company. Start by conducting organized planning sessions with all the key stakeholders from various functions of your business. By involving multiple people and departments into your strategy planning meetings, you’ll bring people on-board early and ensure that your social efforts won’t fall flat.
2: Give a voice to your brand
Your company inherently has a persona which is likely already reflected in your design, media materials or customer collateral. Embrace it and reflect that on social.
To strengthen your voice, work as a team to nail down the social personality you want to portray. If your brand is funny, serious or intellectual, put the proverbial pen to paper to ensure social content is consistent regardless of who is behind the keyboard.
3: Amplify with the right people
All the strategy sessions in the world will prove useless unless you have the right people and tools on tap to execute. Build a cross-functional team of brand advocates within your company and equip them with the right training and education to handle any and all social requests and questions. Your social media team should be comprised of people who are both passionate about your business and have strong communication and delivery skills. Rule of thumb: if they can speak intelligently about your company in person, they can most likely do so on social.
4: Deliver quality content
Give your audience a reason to listen and keep them coming back for more. If your Twitter feed only consists of retweets or promotional messages, your followers will lose interest quickly. Create a mixture of content including first-person insights, consumer responses and third-party articles to ensure your followers stay engaged.
Avoid anything too promotional – be genuine, be emotional (it’s ok!) and never insert yourself into a social conversation with solicitation or noise that fails to add value.
5: Define and measure success
There is no one-size-fits-all answer for measuring social success – it is different for every company and campaign. To set your vision of success, first identify your overall brand goals and then establish metrics that align with those goals. If you want to broadly increase awareness, perhaps a good measure of success is total reach; if you want to establish your brand as a customer service dynamo, you might want to measure reduction in response rate for customer questions. Remember to sit down before, during and after a campaign to benchmark and check in on your metrics.
6: Know when to walk away
We all know how the social media landscape can change in an instant. The hottest social network today could be passé next month. To stay on top of the wave and ensure your social efforts aren’t falling on deaf ears, develop an environment to test and learn.
Take a look at historical data, upward/downward trends and other factors that influence social network performance. Continuously ask yourself if the platform is still reaching your target audience and if it is worth your current time and personnel investment.