Today’s reality is that your organization needs to be on social media. You can no longer rely on issuing press releases and keeping your website up to date to get your message out. You must proactively lead conversations and participate in stories using Internet- and mobile-based social platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube.
To successfully start and maintain your social media presence, however, you need to know what works and what doesn’t. More importantly, you need to understand the “social” side of social media and how not to act like a feed robot. Below are my top 10 social media tips for online success:
1. Listen to your audience. To avoid having staff members talk at people about your brand, product or service (and turn them off), you need to get a feel for what your online audience wants to hear about. Be sure to identify the online social spaces where your audience is already communicating. Then monitor the conversations that happen there and gather intelligence to help you develop content your audience is interested in. Sometimes, it’s also useful to talk to your audience directly. Ask for feedback and suggestions and then act on that feedback.
2. Provide great service and conversations. Always remember social media is more than just a platform to push your our brand, product, or service. It’s a “social” community. It’s critical to engage your online audience in conversations and spend time asking and answering questions. Your audience will value these interactions if they get the feeling you truly care.
3. Give them something to talk about. Make sure you mix up content about your brand, product, or service with interesting videos and links from around the web (i.e., don’t just use your own content). Have some fun from time to time too. Try posting a photo of the week or month, asking trivia questions, or issuing challenges.
4. Ask for content. Appealing to your online audience’s creative side can provide fresh and informative content to your social platforms. It also can help your audience become an invaluable source of news and information when people at the scene of an event feed you content.
5. Post regularly. An out-of-date social media presence is ineffective. Your online audience will lose interest quickly and stop coming by to check your content. Worse yet, audience members may “unlike” you or stop following you.
6. Focus on quality, not quantity. Having a large following on social platforms is nice but not necessarily a measure of success. What you need is a following that is active in spreading the word about your brand, product, or service. Focus on growing active participants, not sheer numbers.
7. When bad news hits, post cleared information as it comes in. We’ve all learned that good news travels fast online, but bad news travels faster. In a crisis, you need to get ahead of the story and post information as soon as management clears it. Don’t wait for a press release. If you don’t act fast, an information void can quickly fill with rumors. And in the world of social media, the perception of truth can be just as powerful as the truth itself.
8. Promote your social media presence. Social media doesn’t work like the Field of Dreams: “if you build it, they will come.” You need to tell your audience how to find you. Place links on your website, put them in your e-mail signature, and highlight them in marketing materials and press releases.
9. Customize the experience.Don’t simply use the default settings of social platforms. Deviating from the defaults makes your profiles appear to be more professional and allows you to create a cohesive look and feel in synch with your brand across social platforms.
10. Measure results.Be sure to measure your online effectiveness against measures (e.g., community participation, earned mentions, sales, donations, etc.) appropriate to your organization’s communications objectives. Continuously evaluate these metrics so adjustments can be made for the future.
If you have any tips from your own experience establishing and maintaining a social media presence, please share them in the comments section.
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