Five Pointers For Your Social Media Strategy

27 Sep 2012

It is very tempting for businesses to open up social media accounts on as many platforms as is humanly possible. If you have a presence everywhere then you will be very visible and available across the web for you customers and potential clients and surely this is a good thing? Well, maybe not always…

Recent social media comments by England cricketer Kevin Pietersen have shown that tweeting is an easy way of getting you into hot water. Hashtag campaigns by Waitrose and McDonalds have backfired in spectacular fashion.

Other established brands are taking a deeper look into their social media agendas and are bucking trends. In a flurry of publicity, global car giant GM pulled a Facebook ad campaign reported to be worth $10 million following a marketing review.

It seems playing the social media game isn’t quite as straightforward as it may seem.  And if the waters weren’t murky enough, a whole industry around the business use of social media has appeared and with it being such a new development, there is very little by way of regulation so “experts” are springing up left right and centre offering opinions and advice.

As illustrated in the examples above, if some of the major players are falling down when it comes to social media, what chance do the rest of us have with limited budget and resource? Well, simple as it may seem (and here at OpenCRM we do like to keep it simple, or KISS), a little common sense goes a long way and so here are a few basic points to remember:

1. Do you monitor your channels? If you create a Facebook page for your business and leave it to sit there without doing anything, how can you be sure negative comment about your product or service is not being published? Or competitors may be using your platform to promote their services?

2. Do you respond to comments? Remember social media is a two-way channel, so when you are asked a question, chances are the person is expecting a response.

3. Is your audience on the same channel as you? You may be publishing to your heart’s content on Pinterest, but if your audience is predominantly active on Twitter you may be posting into the void.

4. Are you posting valuable content? If you are simply letting the world know what you had for breakfast or just retweeting instead of creating content, people will soon tune out as the impression given will be that you’re not bringing anything to the discussion table.

5. Are you keeping your pages up to date? If you set yourself up on as many platforms as possible only to let the tumbleweed take over, it will reflect badly on you and your organisation, people may even start to wonder if you are still in business.

Of course, you are able to pull content from your social media channels into your CRM system. Details of potential clients and comments made by customers can be brought in and with a few clicks you can create a report which you can use to show just about ony data within your CRM, such as the platforms where your audience is active.

These are just a few of the many basic steps worth following when setting up a social media strategy and as our use of the different channels develops this list is going to grow constantly and remain a work in progress as our usage of the social web develops and matures.