Is your social media going nowhere?
“I am fed up with posting on social media for my company, week in week out – the same! Hardly any engagement from all of that effort. So boring”. Is this your view too? Are you thinking this way for some time as well? Are you in a rut? Worst of all, no one around you seems to see a problem. Social media is treated as yet another output channel. All they are interested in is what are the reach figures are this week. Is your social media going nowhere?
I have been there. I have met many people in that situation, in different companies, different verticals, large and small, from around the world.
Step out from only using the traditional channels. There is more out there than Twitter and Facebook.
Now is the time to make a difference!
Make a change – Be more effective with your time. Get business relevant results. How do you get started? First you need a strategy. Not just to get better social results, but instead to get better social media results that are recognized as valuable by your business.
Talk about all your new successes in the light of their relevance to the business plan. This will help to gain more buy-in and attention. This leads to bigger budgets and more resources for future activities.
Define your target audiences. Learn to create posts that will be inspirational or informative to a particular audience. Posts designed for everyone are not effective. Therefore do LESS in quantity and MORE in quality. Use targeting where you can. Sometimes you can do this organically, but include some paid promotion to reach more than your existing follower base. The content has to be spot on, so start a content marketing project. Content was and always will be King at the end of the day.
Lastly, recognize that people are people. When you remove the bots there is a human being at every account. Work with your brand and communication team to create a new engaging tone of voice and conversation approach.
“Now you are talking WITH your audience… not at them“.
Check again if your answer to this question is improving – “Is Your Social Media Going Nowhere?” Practice explaining these improvements so that your stakeholders can easily understand.
Make Social Media “Bigger”
Integrate social with other digital tactics like search optimization (SEO), newsletters, eCommerce, customer relationship management (CRM) projects. Set KPIs tied to clear business objectives.
My most important currency is always a business lead, but insights are super important too. In my early days I arranged for some of the discovered insights (e.g. suggestions about products, or feedback) to be valued. I selected a few of them to follow through to obtain a “business value” for them. I admit that this is a lot of coordination work to follow up with the business development colleagues. However, at the end of the quarter I would add up the estimated insight “business value” totals to the leads that became orders and the leads that developed to pipeline estimates.
Later on you can mature and even develop a roadmap. Expand the use of social media, mitigating the business risk as you grow. Track the effectiveness of word-of-mouth and build it into your campaigns. Use social media marketing to support other areas like recruitment, and employee personal branding, the supply chain etc.
Is your social media going nowhere? Now is the time to change and make a difference!
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