Social media strategy starting points
Social media adoption promises plenty of positive benefits to modern businesses. It is simple, quick, cost-effective, and can help organisations to reach out and collaborate with wide audiences in a variety of interactive forms that simply can’t be achieved through direct communications. Forrester Research analysts predict that by 2010, 82% of all companies will be using social media marketing. Unfortunately there are now too many companies trying their hand at social media without a well thought through strategy. They are blindly jumping on the social media bandwagon without any clear understanding of how to implement it. Companies need to take a step back and plan sound social media strategies as they would any other projects they choose to undertake.
The first step towards implementing a cohesive social media strategy is to set clear aims and objectives. What exactly is the company trying to achieve with social media? There might be many aims, including: increasing sales; increasing engagement with customers; or even decreasing the amount spent on more traditional research and development. Each company must also decide what ‘success’ would look like, and how progress might be measured. This is an important consideration when attempting to prove the business case or ROI of any social media undertaking and to check that the strategy is headed in the right direction.
At the core of social media strategy is the need to fully understand customers, as well as understanding how those customers want to interact with the company. If user research has been conducted for previous projects, then this might be used as a platform from which to develop. For example, if a company has invested in personas during the development of their website, they might choose to update those personas to include their social media usage and help them better understand how any decisions made would feel from a customer perspective.
Of course a company should also listen to what is already being said about them. Social media strategists often talk about tracking ‘buzz’. It is extremely useful to understand who is talking about a company or product, where those conversations are happening and what is being said. This ‘buzz’ can also help to identify which people or conversations are exerting the biggest influence on customer opinion, and what proportion of the potential market are talking about the company in comparison to competitors. By better understanding these factors, a company will know what is being said to influence the perception of their company. There are free tools available for ‘social listening’, as well as extremely powerful subscription tools that can be used to more intelligently search the social space.
Listening to customers is an excellent starting point from which to begin developing a social media strategy. This can stem from understanding who is talking about a company and who is not. Gaps can be identified, or areas where people are not talking in complimentary terms. Once they have an informed idea of where these gaps are, a company can participate in conversations, or create content, with some knowledge of where to aim content and who they are aiming that content at. Solutions might include: participating in social networking sites; releasing podcasts; blogging; or creating a customised interactive widget for customers to use.
One all too common way in which companies still manage to get social media wrong is to head straight for tool and application rollout without any basis of solid user research. Additionally, user research should not end once this initial process has been completed – instead it should be regarded as an ongoing task, first engaging with customers and then measuring the effects of that engagement.
Comments
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Patrick KennedySimple and quick? I think that’s a bit misleading and prolonging the hype and misunderstanding with which many organisations approach social media.
It’s like saying having a professional web presence for your business is easy. Sure, building and launching a website can be straightforward but having a properly supported and operating website is a very much more complex task (ie setting up the “backoffice”). And many organisations still don’t have the processes and personel in place to get this right.
And getting involved in social media is even harder. It’s mire than just signing up to Twitter or creating a facebook fan page. Yes you need a strategy, but there is a he’ll of a lot of work that needs to take place to allow a business to work in a way where such dialogue with customers will work. Otherwise it’s just bolted on and superficial.
We should be advising businesses to look at social media because it’s better for conversing with customers in a more open and natural way, not because it’s quicker or cheaper, because that isn’t necessarily the case.
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Billie AndersenI agree with aspects of your response, in fact the purpose of the article is a call for people to ensure that they effectively plan a social media strategy. The two words ‘simple’ and ‘quick’ at the beginning of the article could be taken as misleading when read in isolation, however the article as a whole warns against ‘jumping blindly on the social media bandwagon’. As you point out in your comment, social media enables more open and natural conversations between companies and customers which I agree with, however that reason alone is not sufficient to drive a social media strategy. As stated in the article, a company needs to understand what their business objectives are for social media, as they will for any project undertaken. This will shape the strategy, and also help to shape how to measure the success of that strategy. It is definitely not heralded as a cheaper or quicker alternative to other ways to interact with customers.
This article should highlight what areas of thought need to occur before even starting a social media strategy, and should highlight a starting point for ways to research the social space. This article should help to stimulate ideas with a company and they will hopefully aim to approach any strategy in a logical and informed manner.
