If you’re reading this, you are almost certainly with a company that uses social media to try and deliver corporate messages to as wide an audience as possible.
And if you’re relatively normal, you probably do it because you think it works … it’s just that you’re not entirely sure why, and you just chuck stuff out there in the hope that it creates a reaction. After all, what harm can it do?
Generally, your own social media feeds do no harm, but it can be difficult seeing how much good it does, and to know whether you’re doing it right. It can often drive web traffic and purchases - often enough for you to think it’s worthwhile, but maybe not often enough for you to think of it as transformational.
But you’ll carry on doing it. Because everyone else does, and who wants to look like a Luddite?
As with many things it helps to have a strategic plan (and we can help you there), but before you do that, just ponder on what it is that you’re trying to achieve.
First, remember, that social media can now be divided into ‘public’ and ‘private’. Without overstating the obvious, ‘public’ social media is that which everyone can see (often Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on). Private are apps which are structured so that people allow you into their world in a much more structured way and/or are encrypted for one-to-one or one-to-few messaging - Snapchat, WhatsApp, Messenger, Signal and so on. The latter group are centred around privacy, just as much as connection and corporate messaging in those spaces is for musing on another day…
For public social media, you will be messaging for one of three main purposes, and it helps if you have one of those purposes in the forefront of your mind when you post. What, exactly, are you trying to achieve?
To amplify messages
Obviously, the core outcome is to deliver content to as wide an audience as possible. To help your organisation become a source of expertise or a trusted provider of products or services. ‘This is what we do - please like, use or buy from us’. A simple commercial message, where the ROI is obvious. If you post or tweet and people visit your website and become buyers, then the job is done.
It’s worth mentioning that amplification is important but is increasingly difficult - on Twitter, for example, it is increasingly difficult to separate noise from signal and the platform is degraded by the ‘success’ of the fake news era, by lots of people simply shouting, not listening and by bots and fake accounts being used for ulterior purposes.
But, if people do listen to your output and think good things about you, but don’t buy from you - that’s a different proposition, which brings us to...
Monitoring opinion and thought
It’s vital to understand what is being said on social media about you or your industry. This can be done ‘scientifically’ with sentiment analysis (where either humans or machines monitor the language used in conversations around you and judge them as positive or negative), or more anecdotally, where you or someone in your team just reads (as and when) the mentions of your company, your product or your industry and makes note of the tone. This is more random but, let’s face it, easier.
So long as it's done on a regular basis, monitoring is key to understanding public mood and opinion in your sector. Such a high percentage of people are active on social media that the notion of opinions being ‘representative’ are less relevant than they were, and the unfiltered approach of social media is more robust and opinions are freely given. Hence, monitoring on a range of relevant topics can be a useful source of opinion at ‘street level’ - with the obvious caveat that such opinion may not be ‘expert’. But it remains a source of ‘implicit consultation’ - taking wider views into consideration with formal processes. Those wider views may be useful both to inform you on how your company and products are viewed.
And it offers up possibilities for…
Engagement with users
Rather than being a passive observer of other people’s opinions, you can treat the platforms as discursive and use them to consult and crowdsource opinions on your products or industry. As you monitor those conversations (above), use that as opportunities to dive in and thank users for positive observations or tackle them on some of the (presumably unfair) comments. There are really just two kinds of social media engagement:
Opportunistic social media engagement
Where your company or, more possibly, individuals within it, respond to comments on social platforms. This is, by its nature, an unregulated process - those who ask permission usually miss the opportunity, because it’s all passed by, by the time it’s signed off. In such cases, it can, with the right people, be better to seek forgiveness than ask permission. It requires common sense amongst the team, adherence to guidelines (especially: ‘don’t get into an argument’; ‘don’t post after hours, or after a drink’) and the discipline to make a point and withdraw rather than prolong debates about whether a product was satisfactory or not.
Appointment-based social media engagement
This is where a specific individual (probably the CEO) answers questions on a single issue on a particular platform at an agreed time. This can be when there are big issues of your own (when there’s a reputational challenge for example) or when the industry is facing issues and you want to show leadership (on the impact of Covid on your industry for example).
This all needs some thought and strategic input. Working on what sort of social media activity can often be hidden behind what sort of scale you undertake. Think about what you want to say, what you want to hear and what you want to converse about. It’s not just about the volume, it’s about the quality and what you learn.
If you want to chat about how you can approach this for your company, then get in touch.
