Facebook is one of the great achievements of our time. Brands have never had such an easy and low-cost way to connect with a large part of the world’s wealthy population. Likewise, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn provide your business with unmatched access to information about current and potential customers.
Many brands have invested in ‘building a presence’ on social networks and have filled their pages with lots of content and have garnered thousands of likes. It’s important to note, presence on a social media networks is not a social strategy, it’s only the first step.
Keep in mind that social media is still in its early stages, and the major players are adjusting their algorithms and features. For instance, in December, Facebook made a change to the News Feed that led many brands to experience a noticeable drop in traffic from Facebook. Additionally, new social networks are creating their own unique audiences and functions, and who knows if we might see another major decline like the one that affected MySpace and Friendster. (Did you know that Friendster once had 115 million users?)
Given this reality, here are 3 ideas to improve your social strategy:
1. Diversify your social presence. Conduct small scale experiments with targeting specific metrics. For example, experiment with promoted Tweets as a way to generate sales leads or start responding to comments on your YouTube videos to improve customer service metrics. You’ll get an idea for what kind of engagement you can get from these networks and you’ll have some basic how-to knowledge if one of these networks suddenly becomes very important to you.
2. Create a social strategy for each department that also works for the whole company. Marketing, sales, product management and customer support all have different goals and should be using social differently. However, the overall customer experience should be consistent. Creating cohesive cross departmental social processes is harder than it sounds.
3. Create an ‘on domain’ social presence. Social networks are a great place to make connections but there’s always a risk of the rug being pulled from under you. (Just ask Zynga.) Put in place a plan to migrate your social media followers to your own branded customer community, to your CRM system and to your email list. A customer community gives customers a social outlet and gives you complete control of the content, branding, privacy policy and data.
Social is here to stay and it’s time to start working on a more mature strategy. How are you working on getting more out of social media?
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