If your social media strategy is working fairly well, awesome. You are listening to your target audience online, jumping into conversations, answering questions and resolving issues, and publishing useful content they comment on and share.
But as your company grows, your strategy needs to be refined a bit for a basic reason: governance. Another way to put it is you need to keep everyone who is involved in your social media strategy organized so your messages don’t get muddled.
Choose Brand Advocates
The first thing you need to figure out is who the right people are to advocate for your brand online. Before you say, “Our marketing people,” stop! Wrong answer.
This might surprise you, but your ideal brand advocates are actually your employees who are producing whatever it is you make. It could be your product managers or engineers, all of whom are doing the work and have a much deeper understanding of what you do. Your customer support people are also ideal, as they are trained to tackle tricky questions with aplomb.
Unless your target audience is C-level executives, the members of your management team are your worst brand advocates. People trust other people like them, so always choose hands-on employees over “suits.”
Take Action on Insights
We’ve already established that you pay attention to what people are talking about online. You analyze all of this data, but do you use it? Very few companies actually take action on these insights, which are such a rich source of ideas that it is a shame to waste them.
Who knows what you could uncover: an idea for a new product or feature, a service or initiative that is in short supply, valuable info on your competition. Make sure someone in your company analyzes all of this intel on a regular basis so you don’t miss the boat on a great opportunity.
Messaging
If you have multiple Facebook pages or Twitter accounts, you cannot be posting the same messages across all these platforms. It’ll look super spammy, lazy and disorganized. You need to know who your audience is on each account and push out content, information and resources that they want and/or need.
Make sure whoever oversees each account is the right person for the job. If you have a Facebook page dedicated to your top-selling product, make sure the product manager is, at the very least, involved in putting together the editorial content that goes out on that channel.
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Have I missed anything? How have you changed your social media strategy as your company has grown? Leave a comment below!
Image courtesy Flickr user Jake Sutton (Creative Commons)
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