Social Media for Growth in 2016
As a business, managing your business’ social media presence is incredibly important and more so over the coming years. So if monitoring social media is not part of your daily routine, you should quickly sit on the drawing board and chalk a plan, This article is to help you to get started…
You need to respond to people talking about your brand and how people view your company, Social media cannot be ignored weather you like it or not, so lets jump into who exactly should be monitoring social media within your company, what they should monitor and why:
- Your marketing team: should think about overall brand image, activity of thought leaders in your industry and conversations around your brand.
2. Support team: to manage concerns, questions people have your products or services. Tracking positive and negative feedback and responding appropriately. Many brands are known to have a separate handles on twitter for support.
3. Executives: A study by Brandfog suggests that social CEO’s are better leaders who can strengthen brands, build trust in products and services, demonstrate brand values and communicate accountability all by simply being on social network. Its all the more important for senior executives to be present and responsive on social media.
4. Salespeople: A research indicates that 72# of salespeople who incorporated social media into their process outperformed their colleagues. Instead of hard selling, social selling resembles lead nurturing and goes a long way. Gone are the days of cold calls!
Its always not possible to respond to each and every interaction on social media so while reaching out and responding make sure that you look for inluencers, their followers, their Klout score or if they are a potential customer. While responding make sure you:
a. Respond promptly. A study by search engine watch suggests that 72% of twitter users especially ones who complain expect response in one hour!
b. Tone should reflect company’s values. Show respect and gratitude, this will leave a long lasting image of your brand.
c. Talk facts instead of opinions while responding to your target audience. You could also use social media for crowd-sourcing to get opinions on your forthcoming product/service.
Here are some important tools that must be part of your social media presence: Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Quora, Google plus, Pinterest. Some free social media monitoring tolls include Tweetdeck, Social Mention, Topsy.
With time you will need to develop better and more effective social media habits, so make sure to have a system and tangible targets in place. If your goal was marketing related, use tools like google analytics to monitor traffic, leads. If it was thought leadership, see if there is increase in coverage of your brand in news, blogs, forums.
Last tip is on SEO. Make sure that all coverage your get on social media contains some sort of text links with phrases about your product or service. Search engines rely heavily on social media mentions and this could go a long way to your company’s visibility & growth.
