For the third in our series of Five things to do in 2009, we are going to look at five things your brand should ask about social media in 2009. During 2008 we have seen a rapid rise in both the volume and the sophistication of how some brands are using social media. In 2009 we expect to see much more of this, with brand learning from examples of good practice and with more innovation in this area.
If you're thinking about using social media or just interested in what it could do for your brand, here are five questions you should be asking yourself in 2009. In fact, if you've got some free time over the next couple of days why not ask yourself them early and steal a march on the competition.
1. Where are people talking about our brand already?
Even if you're not actively using any social media yourselves, your customers almost certainly are. The first step any brand should take when thinking about social media is to see how customers are talking about you right now. Who is talking and what are they saying? And are these the kind of people and the kind of discussions that you think of when you think about your brand online? It is likely that the answer to these questions is no. Not because they are the wrong people, or because they are saying the wrong things. Just because real people on the web talk about things in different ways to the way the brand does. Knowing, who is talking about you, where and how they are discussing you can be a real education and should be the first step to anybody new to social media.
2. What social media are our competitors using? What's best practice in the industry?
It can be very difficult to think of the best use you might make of social media from scratch. Indeed, many people take their inspiration from the likes of Facebook. A better approach is to look at what your competitors are doing and what best practice in your industry might be. Look at your competitor websites, and at other sites they might be sponsoring to see what they are doing and, perhaps more importantly, what of this is working and what isn't. An informative approach can be to look in the forums to find threads where people are talking about their experience of using the site - what do actual users like (and dislike) about competitor sites, and what can you learn from this.
3. What channels do your customers use to interact with you at the moment?
Do you take a lot of calls from customers with questions or queries? Do you have well-used email forms? Do people come to the workplace and talk to you direct? Look at these channels and then investigate what people ask or talk to you about. Are you answering lots of the same questions? Do you have queries you just can't answer? Are you using lots of internal resource interacting with customers in this way? Most brands will find that a good use of social media can help to channel their interactions with some customers or with all customers on some issues. If you analyse and understand these interactions, you can start to plan better how to use social media to better engage with the people who matter most to you.
4. What tools have you tried yourself?
It's difficult to understand how social media tools work if you haven't tried them for yourself. Have you shared photos online? Do you follow people on Twitter? Have you ever contributed to a forum or commented on a video. Think about what use you have made of social media and how you have contributed your own content to the web using these tools. Maybe try one or two - join a forum discussion, comment on somebody's photo on Flickr, or maybe follow somebody on Twitter (if you don't know anybody feel free to start with me). You will start to understand what it feels like to use social media tools and then will be in a better position to think about which are right for your customer.
5. What business aim will this contribute to?
Brands should only be using social media where it contributes to a specific business aim, now more than ever. This might be a very hard aim (I want to increase sales through our e-commerce platform by x, or I want to gather data on y customers) or it might be a softer one (I want to generate more ideas for the business, or I want to treat all our customers like they are the really special ones). Only when your use of social media is tied to a specific aim will you be able to get it right and make it measurable. Start with a large piece of paper on which you write all of your businesses objectives and for each one brainstorm ways in which social media might help. This piece of paper should serve as the blueprint for taking your ideas forward, testing and developing them and then starting to use social media in a sensible, targeted way.
Read all of our Five Things to Do in 2009 posts
Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog
Some more reading
- Are customers the true BFF's?
- Don't Rush Into Social Media
- How Can We Keep the Passionate Community Without the Risk?
- Social media brings new risks for companies and employees...
- If You Remove the Social from Social Media Tools ...
Link to original post