Why do you need a Social Media Team?
Your business should manage its online reputation actively, aggressively and continuously with no letup ever. This can get arduous and nerve-wracking, unless you follow a certain discipline to manage it. Good understanding of various social media channels is necessary and you need to be progressive and innovative in using these channels. Being active online in these channels, you will always be provided with ample opportunities to build your business, increase customer base, improve revenues, have more satisfied clientele, be one-up on your competition amongst other things. You should be able to exercise greater influence and control over your business and online reputation by following tips in this post.
Create an EXCLUSIVE Social Media Team (SMT)
A team of dedicated professionals with a supervisor at a senior level is required to manage this whole Social Media equation for your organization. Size of the team will vary but you need people with the time, resources and skills that understand different channels well. The team members should understand your domain, services, strengths, weaknesses & competition. Most members should have good communication skills and understand customer psyche. This team usually straddles between Marketing, Sales, Business Development and even IT.
What would the team do?
1. Listening and Responding
There is substantial amount of work involved in managing what is being said about you on the internet and elsewhere. Listening is an important and labor intensive skill. Also, it is not just about listening but also providing the right responses when appropriate.
Listening should also be expanded to track happenings in your industry including tracking your competition, tracking star performers in your industry, overall economic health of the segment, any new government initiatives, new technologies revolutionizing your vertical etc.
Your marketing team could use these details could be used to your advantage.
2. Creating Content
The team should bolster your online presence by creating fresh content online on a fairly regular basis that potentially drowns out any negative comments and sentiment to the back pages of search engine results. Tweet and retweet useful information and content regularly, provide reasons for your customers to follow you on Twitter and visit your Facebook pages regularly. All this is only possible with the help of dedicated team members whose only job is to keep your social media channels active
3. Track Metrics Aggressively
You also need in the team folks that understand the importance of metrics and how to use these to your company's advantage. The team should understand your competition and actively lookout for what is being said about them and tracks them too. Your team needs to know what brings in the traffic to your website and results in revenues by using tools like Google Analytics. Track the outcomes of any ad campaigns or email campaigns run by the sales and marketing team and determine how customer behavior changes in the social media channels.
You will be presented with several instances when potentially you could "steal" your competitor's clients and business by listening and then providing your own remedies for problems caused by your competitors for their clients. Such opportunities usually come up very sudden and sometimes need immediate addressing.
5. Establish rules of engagement
Establish a communications protocol or framework that is effective and usable. While it creates a boundary for the team members on what they can say and when, it should also give relative freedom to express themselves.
What are the typical characteristics of the team?
Apart from possessing the right skills, this team has to be available 24x7x365. The Internet NEVER SLEEPS, so also this team. This is one absolute given.
Also, the team has to be led by a person from senior management giving it enough authority to act independently of course within the bounds of corporate communication needs.
Give the team a voice of its own.