Articulate your Social Media Strategy for an Enterprise
The adoption of social media has been increasing in enterprises at a rapid pace across the world. As the social media ‘behaviour’ or the way it engages with the community, forms an impression about the brand of the enterprise in the minds of the prospective and existing customers, it’s imperative to have a well-articulated and detailed strategy in place. There are seven key decisions for drafting the social media strategy. If your enterprise has already embarked on the social media journey, it may be helpful to revisit some or all of these on a periodic basis to ensure an efficient Social Media presence.
1. OBJECTIVE: This is the first and most important step. The primary motivation to be on social media should be well defined. For instance, it may be for boosting sales, enhancing brand awareness, crowd sourcing ideas or raising funds in case of non-profits. There would be ‘spill overs’. For instance, the objective of improving brand image may result in increased sales. However, it’s important to prioritise and thus target efforts towards the focus area. Based on the level of success in achieving the primary objective, later on the enterprise can focus on other areas.
2. SELECTING SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS: Based on the dedicated bandwidth available to engage on social media, and the Social Media Platforms ( Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc) which ‘influence’ the target audience the most, the next key decision is to select a mix of social media sites which enterprise may like to engage on. The enterprise should never commit the mistake of being present on ‘all popular platforms’, just because it’s a fad. There may be a high possibility that the audience is not engaged appropriately, either because of lack of response from the enterprise or absence of TR stimulating content tailored to that particular platform. This will result in a negative brand perception.
3. CONTENT STRATEGY: Depending on the target audience, the next step is to decide the core messaging, identify the form in which to serve the content (video, picture or text), select the timing (when most of the audience is logged in to the social network) and set the frequency (periodicity of delivering the tweet, status update et al).
4. PLANNING THE ENABLING ORGANISATION: One of the critical choices at this point is to decide whether to outsource the execution of social media presence or do the same in-house. While there are pros and cons for both, it’s always beneficial to build capability in-house and dedicate executives having an in-depth understanding of the enterprise offering and the community members (fans on Facebook, followers on Twitter, etc). Community Manager (CM) is the key interface and voice of the enterprise on any social network. Besides CM, content creators or curators and design team also needs to be identified.
5.ESTABLISHING WAYS OF WORKING: The CM should be well connected to the various departments or functions like R&D, HR, and Marketing, etc. within the enterprise. This is required as there may be query or a grievance pertaining to a particular department of the company seeking in-depth information. The time to respond to a particular query internally (from the department to the CM), the time to respond to the community member externally and other SLAs (the extent to which information can be shared taking into account confidentiality, etc) should be agreed on between the CM and the department, functions. Also in case of conflicting views between the CM and the respective department on how to respond to a query or address a grievance, the escalation mechanism should be worked out in a detailed manner. This is important to give timely and adequate reply to the community member.
6. CRISIS MANAGEMENT: Crisis may strike in the form of a virus attack (posting repeated messages) or hacking of the community page or a particular community member trying to repeatedly tarnish the image of the enterprise by posting negative messages or a particular status update/tweet by the enterprise received in poor light by the community. A mechanism should be worked out for responding to all such crisis situations clearly nominating the respective personals/executives to be involved.
7. SOCIAL MEDIA ROI MEASUREMENT: The enterprise needs to decide on which metrics to monitor for measuring it is RoI linked to the objective and also to continuously improve its social media engagement. The metrics can be operational like number of views (YouTube), retweets, Followers ( Twitter), Likes ( Facebook) etc. Or business linked like increased sales, cost of handling a customer query etc. It can also be a mix of the two. Tools to track social media metrics across platforms can be leveraged by the enterprise for measuring RoI. For instance, Adobe SocialAnalytics and ‘Social Reports’ in Google Analytics aim to measure Social Media RoI and provide insights.