Does your corporation support social media marketing efforts? More often than not the answer is probably not. The stark reality is that senior management buy-in happens only after a company has tested social media marketing and the case can be made to build on the campaign strategy.
Given that a small amount of corporations haven’t even began to start their social media campaigns, it’s no surprise that many corporate employees are stuck in the testing phase.
When looking to build out your social media in a corporate environment it’s important to Develop a solid social media marketing plan. While it’s important to understand how social media works, as with any marketing initiative, you must have a carefully constructed strategy. In order to build your social media case, the best alternative is to integrate with other channels within the organization. From Public Relations to general online marketing, you will find that working with other departments within the corporate structure will help you gain small wins and ultimately prove the need for going after larger fish later.
First of all, get your senior management’s buy-in and support. If your senior executives don’t embrace social media marketing, you will need to make the case for how it’ll enhance the corporate bottom line. The key is to tie everything to revenue and show an increase in return on investment. The challenge is that social media’s impact may occur in the early phases of the purchase process where it’s difficult to tie it to a clear conversion. Show value in terms of brand building, expanded reach, reduced customer service expense, and lower hiring costs.
Providing resources with regards to headcount and budget. While you can do an effective job of testing social media marketing with limited investment and headcount, expanding these efforts and integrating them with the rest of your marketing plans generally requires additional support. Utilize the resources the within your corporate structure. If a designed likes to tweet or use Facebook, encourage them to support your social media efforts. They will have fun doing it, it will give you access to a resource that already exists, and the corporation is better for it.
With that, Establishing a set of social media guidelines regardless of whether your company is actively participating in social media or not, is crucial to ensuring that your social media marketing goes smoothly. Have policies in place to define acceptable social media behavior for employees representing your company on social media platforms, employees engaged in social media for personal reasons, and customer participation on company sites.
Always have a solid crisis management plan ready. Since a small incident can quickly get amplified across a variety of social media platforms, it is extremely important that you develop a crisis management plan outlining how your company will respond. At a minimum, you need to have the ability to contact the appropriate people quickly.
Mos importantly track everything, and just when you through you were tracking everything, go back and track more. As with any marketing program, it’s important to assess your results against your goals.
Regardless of where any corporation is when is comes to social media marketing, having a good solid plan is imperative to the success for corporate social media.