The Social Media Strategy

Melissa Woodard (@SocialMiss) made an interesting blog post earlier about the adoption of social media in the day to day operations of business. While some companies have embraced social media, others have a more casual approach to it. Some don’t quite know how to integrate the concept of social media into their business, and some still don’t quite get what social media is all about. Is social media hard to manage? No.

The plethora of cross-medium tools available today make it fairly easy for an individual (or team) to keep track of your social identity, but you do need to put some thought into it. Tools like Hootsuite can help you manage LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. from a single tool (and support multiple users if you’re running a team of folks to help oversee your social media presence), but as great as Hootsuite is-it’s not going to hold your hand in making the right decisions with your social media identities.

Have a strategy with measurable goals
So what is your social media strategy? Some companies focus on getting as many followers (or following) as many people as they can, but there’s more to it than that. Lets say you have 500 random followers; people that you just acquired along the way, of all different walks of life, in all different parts of the country (or world). Compare that to 250 targeted followers; people who have an interest in what you have to say, people who are likely to re-tweet what you write. Which is more valuable? If I’m tweeting about a sale I’m having, or offering tips relevant to using my product, doesn’t it make sense that my followers should be people that are interested in or use the product?

If you can’t use your follower count to gauge the success of your social media strategy, how can you? For Twitter in particular, tools like Klout are useful for gauging your actual reach and presence. Klout combines many different data points to calculate how much “Klout” you have within the social media world. How many followers you have certainly weighs into it, but just as important are items like how often you tweet, how many of those tweets are new content, and how many people re-tweet your content.

Engage your followers
Use your social identities to spread information not just on your individual products, services or promotions, but about news and other information related to your market and industry. Diversifying your content (within a particular market) will make your followers that much more interested. However, with that comes a certain responsibility to be consistent. Don’t tweet about something today, then about something ten degrees from that topic tomorrow. Be relevant to today–if someone writes something about your product, acknowledge it and engage that user if necessary.

Your social media identity can be an invaluable resource to add to your customer service strategy. We’ve all seen people tweet complaints, but what makes a company stand out is capturing those complaints, turning them around, and solving their customer’s issues in the public domain. That’s a powerful message to send your customers (and potential customers). Not only do I have a solid product, but I care about what you have to say, and I want to make things right.

Examples

A great example of this is my complaint last weekend about Time Warner Cable. I’d made a call to tech support for a service outage, the tech did the usual “let me reset your box” which obviously didn’t work, then claimed there was nothing more he could do (and the next service slot wasn’t until Monday). In short, he was pretty useless and really did nothing to fix my problem-but when I tweeted that I got an almost instant reply from @TWCableHelp asking for more information, trying to diagnose my issue deeper and make the situation better.

Another company that’s got their social media strategy spot on is Continental Airlines (@Continental). I have no idea how many people they have working on that team, but they do some really creative things and keep their audience engaged. They give the usual traveler related information on weather and potential delays, but they also do trivia questions for vouchers, competitions, etc. At one point they ran a promotion where they tweeted from a specific gate at an airport and the first x people to come see them got a prize. In addition, the casual and friendly attitude they have in the social media world makes Twitter a great place to provide feedback on service (both good and bad).

Travis and Benny over at LiquidWeb (@LiquidWeb) have also identified that balance of support, promotion and relevant information. If I’m a customer, then things like their #LWTips are great ways for them to engage me as a customer, keep me focused on the product, and perhaps help me see new ways to use the product (potentially making me a bigger customer).

Have a positive attitude
This brings me to my final thought. How do you conduct yourself on twitter. Obviously if I’m tweeting as myself (@webdes03) then what I’m writing reflects my personal thoughts/views, and I’m the one writing them. But what if I’ve got 5 people working my social media identity? I see people crossing business talk with personal talk all the time, and that’s okay (to a degree) if you’re just an individual, but you should follow some ground rules to keep yourself in check. Remember that in the social media world things can potentially spread like wildfire, so you shouldn’t say things you don’t want your customers (or potential customers) to see. Attitude says a lot about service, and while your casual 4-letter explicative that you tweeted to the world on Saturday night was just a joke, that tweet is still around for your customers to read Monday morning; so be professional. If you’ve got a team of people working your identity, have them mark their initials at the end of the tweet; Hootsuite will even do this automatically. This puts some accountability on your people to help ensure they’re being professional, and even helps your followers see that there’s more than just one person working the social media identity.