So you’ve got a Facebook page, a Twitter handle and a corporate blog, now what? Many organizations have realized the value social media can bring including increased brand awareness, improved customer relationships and thought leadership.
While leveraging these platforms to educate and engage with key audiences is critical, oftentimes companies have several different handles, fan pages and owners and processes which can create a fragmented social media program. It’s important that social media programs are tightly integrated to ensure they are easy to manage and poised to positively impact a company.
Consider the following tips if you’re thinking about formalizing your social media program:
- Develop Social Media Policy – Many organizations have a social media policy in place. If you don’t, you need one. According to an article in Inc. , “A social media policy outlines for employees the corporate guidelines or principles of communicating in the online world.” Social media policies guides employees about confidentiality, mitigates potential legal issues and protects trade secrets and other proprietary information.
- Educate Employees – With the lines between personal and professional use on Twitter and Facebook and blogs blurring, ensuring that employees understand your organization’s social media vision, policy and best practices is essential. We recently outlined some ideas for how to educate employees on your company’s expectations when it comes to leveraging social media. The goal is to ensure all employees have a good sense of what is appropriate and what is not with regard to the use of social media.
- Formalize Social Media Activity – Taking the time to formalize social media activity can be worthwhile as it ensures consistency, continuity and establishes a clear line of ownership. In order to effectively formalize your social media program it’s important to identify channel owner(s), refine messaging for each Twitter handle or Facebook page as well as develop a process for generating ongoing content.
- Designate handle/page owners – It’s important to identify who will own each of the company’s Twitter handles or Facebook pages. This could be the product manager, or a marketing or PR person.
- Refine messaging –The look, feel and messaging within each Twitter handle or Facebook page will need to be consistent to ensure continuity. For example, you want to make sure how you describe the company is consistent and tailored to each channel. Additionally you’ll want to ensure there is some continuity in company logos or images that are used across multiple Twitter handles or Facebook.
- Develop and ongoing editorial calendar – Successful social media programs include consistent engagement with key audiences. This incorporates a balance of posting content and responding to discussions within the Twittersphere and Facebook. Developing a fluid, ongoing editorial calendar is an easy way manage this process and could include content such as highlighting new blog posts, press releases, key media coverage, videos, company and product updates and events.
Establishing a presence on social media platforms is an ongoing initiative. It takes consistent engagement with key audiences and compelling content. By developing a framework for your social media program, you’ll be in a much better position to develop and maintain your presence on these platforms and garner all the benefits of social media.