3 Steps to Success in Social Media

It makes good sense to plan out a comprehensive social technology strategy and pull together all your social media efforts into a straight-forward and manageable process. By doing this you will put your marketing team and yourself onto a measurable and predictable path.

In order to be effective you must consider three very important areas; marketing, business operations and customer service. With the absence of a well-planned information flow that includes customers, your ability to respond effectively and leverage the social web is greatly reduced.

With this in mind, here are three points to consider with regards to a more successful social media strategy:

Social Media Marketing

Social media generally begins in marketing. Marketing is frequently the first place where listening tools such as Radian 6 and NetBase are deployed. Beyond listening, marketing (and in some cases PR), is also typically responsible for the main outreach channels such as Facebook, Twitter, a company blog etc. These are the components of a basic social media marketing program. If you combine these with a well-designed program and the incorporation of basic analytics, a social media outreach program can be very powerful in your marketing plan.

Social Business

Companies that are connected to their customers will have the easiest time participating in the rapidly increasing social markets. It is important to consider the ways in which information flows inside and outside the organization and then returns to the customers. Decide if your firm is set up mainly to serve customers or to serve itself. Both ways are suitable, but only one way is social.

Social CRM

While listening is important, active outreach is also important.  Having a Facebook business page, for example, creates a place where conversations can take place, but doesn’t necessarily give you a way to match those conversations with your business, rather than through regularly introducing new content.

Social customer relationship management (CRM) is needed. It is important to keep track of who said what and build a predictive outreach form for your customer care teams. Social CRM requires you to manage your social media beyond marketing. That means implementing technology that allows the conversational flow from the social web to be filtered and passed to resources inside your organization that can react and respond, as a team.

Customers and companies are now socially connected.  The three afore-mentioned key business disciplines – marketing, customer service, and business operations, can be combined in order to move your social media marketing program to a complete business program.

Develop tools that offer you a complete view of your customers. For example, knowing a customer is simply on Twitter is one thing, but knowing that they are on Twitter and have a history of expensive purchasing, is another point entirely.

Try to create a social presence that invites customers to collaborate with you and connect you to them through the channels that they use.

Whilst considering your social media marketing program, look at the bigger picture of your organization as a social business. Consider collaboration with your customers and enable yourself to create a long-term social technology plan that will make your life much simpler in the long run.

If you would like some information on how to improve your social media presence, why not give us a call to discuss this with us.