8 Tips for Social Business Part 1
Step 1. Evaluating your Social Goals
As part of our commitment to clients, we partake in ongoing professional learning, part of which in the later parts of 2015 and the beginning of 2016 has been concentrating on Digtial Marketing, or Social Media Marketing for your social business. Hootsuite whom we are a solutions partner for have kindly put together an eight part programme of tips and snippets of useful information for us to offer to you directly.
After taking stock of your organisation’s social media useage, it’s time to ask just a few questions.
First, where have you already or where do you plan to deploy social business programs and against which particular set of business aims or goals? In either case, avoid considering social media in a vacuum. Take the time to understand where it best fits your organisation and how to integrate it into existing organisational and departmental business goals. After all you’re not reinventing the wheels for social media management, just using it to make the ones you have turn faster and last longer..
Where will it allow you to reach your customers who most crave a deeper, richer conversation?
Perhaps it’s the sales or marketing departments, the traditional home of social media in business, but that’s not a given. Perhaps it should be HR? Maybe you’re better to consider developing a robust internal social ecosystem, harnessing the power of inward-facing social media before you begin look outward? How are you going measure and quantify the success of social media programs?
Begin to look beyond the vanity metrics such as Likes and Follows and try, for example, to find a direct link between conversation and conversion. Focus on influence and analytics over inflating a group size or follower base. Check out online Google Trends for ideas on how best to speak to your market via Social Media.
What resources can you reasonably afford to dedicate to social in terms of time and tools?
The allocation of human resources is far and away the most significant cost generally tied to social business practices. What will your team(s) look like? Identify leadership within your organisation or begin the hunt to find talent from the outside your business (with a Digital Marketing Consultant). With your team(s) in place, educate and cross-train team members so that they can be rotated across different areas of each specialisation. Empower your people. We practice this at Hootsuite as a way of providing our people the ability to engage our customers multi-dimensionally rather than silo-ing expertise department to department.
Look for a reliable and scalable social tool that centralises control over your social platforms and puts the power to listen, engage, collaborate and analyze in the hands of your do-ers, practitioners and experts. Make decisions about which platforms you will be active on or where you may need to consolidate existing accounts. Observe the largest organizations in your industry vertical and learn from their successes and mistakes. Engage them in conversation about the future of social in your industry. Look deeper than the usual social suspects like Facebook and Twitter to other platforms like Quora or Get Satisfaction where you may have existing communities of powerful unpaid social advocates already at work on your behalf.
Original article written by Evan LePage. Originally posted on HootSource. Hootsuite Pro 30 day free trial.
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