How to Get Employees to Embrace Social Media

#1: Define the End Goal

First, identify how and why social media will be used to meet specific business and brand goals.

For example, a business goal is to increase revenue by 10%, whereas a brand goal is to create deeper relationships with your existing clients.

Clearly define realistic, concrete and measurable goals to give your team objectives to pursue.

Define your goals to create the internal structure you need for your social media presence. Image source: iStockPhoto.

#2: Create a Social Media Task Force

Depending on your company’s size, one person or a group of people will lead your social media efforts. Assign the following roles to group members:

• Lead strategist: Responsible for long-term strategic vision and ensuring day-to-day initiatives are mapped back to specific goals.
• Content manager: Leads all content strategy and development across social. This role often extends into website and other digital properties.
• Community manager: Publishes content across all social media channels; spurs conversations with existing and prospective customers, influencers and media.
• Analyst: Measures the success of social media by benchmarking key performance indicators (KPI) against business and brand goals.
• Social media coordinator: Facilitates communication by planning monthly meetings and staff emails. This individual may also be a resource from the core team (versus creating a new role).

Kathleen Ngo, social media specialist at Sony Electronics, says:

“At Sony, we recognize the impact social can have in terms of driving brand awareness and even conversion. Having a team devoted to social allows us to be nimble and responsive. We’re able to implement real-time marketing efforts to supplement our larger brand campaigns, as well as to understand the voice of the customer and pass valuable feedback along to our product teams. We can go beyond content creation and focus on other verticals, including events/sponsorships and influencer relations.”

All of these individuals work closely together to collaborate on content approaches that appeal to your target audience(s) and decide how to execute campaignsand find the most valuable and relevant tools your brand will use.

Your social media task force will work together for successful social media campaigns. Image source: iStockPhoto.

#3: Develop a Holistic Social Media Strategy

Once the team is assembled, strategists lead and work with all team members to lay the groundwork for your social presence through a holistic social media strategy. The team answers questions such as:

• What do you want to achieve by being present across social media? What’s the goal?
• What are your target audience segments? Are there multiple segments—for example, media versus consumer? Based on this, across which social networks should the brand be present? What should each channel do? What should it not do?
• How does brand voice translate across social channels? What types of words and tone best describe your brand? What types of words do not?
• Using social media monitoring, competitive insights and focus groups, what is/are your target audience(s) interested in learning? Based on these insights, what’s your brand’s content strategy?
• How often should content be proactively published across each channel?
• Which tools can be used to streamline publishing, monitoring and measurement?
• How do social media efforts tie into your larger digital ecosystem? How can your team support and/or leverage other groups working in digital, such as your brand website, one-off campaigns, SEO, SEM and display advertising initiatives? How often should you meet and communicate?

The team will develop company-wide social media guidelines, which are applicable to both the social media task force and employees. These rules are shared and approved by senior leadership, and made public to the company through a staff email and on the company intranet to minimize risk of how your brand is represented across social media channels.

This strategy is referred to during each team meeting to ensure all individuals are collectively working toward the same goals.

#4: Consistency Is Key

To ensure content is consistently developed, published, tracked and analyzed, hold weekly one-hour social planning meetings where each resource spends 10 minutes to update team members on what he or she has recently learned.

Regular social planning meetings facilitate the success of your social media marketing. Image source: iStockPhoto.

Devote the meeting’s last 20 minutes to brainstorming. One-half of the month’s meetings focus on strategy to ensure all parties are on the same path toward the brand’s long-term social media footprint. The other two meetings focus on content ideation to identify new ways to deliver content through creative assets, contests, etc.

#5: Use Tools to Your Advantage

Whether you do or don’t have a budget, various tools are available to effectively support content publishing, tracking and optimization:

Free tools:

• Publishing: HootSuite simplifies content publishing and helps you track links.Use this tool to schedule content in advance, but keep in mind the importance of proactively checking social profiles daily to respond to messages. Be cautious of pre-scheduled content during current events such as natural disasters, and be sensitive to the local, regional and/or national community during difficult times.
• Measurement: Use Wildfire App’s monitoring tool to benchmark against competitors and gauge social community growth over time.
  

  Use Wildfire to monitor the growth of your social community.

Paid tools:

• Workflow and publishing: For more complex organizations with longer-cycle approval processes, Kapost helps create workflow streams and assigns specific roles such as “final approver” to various individuals.
• Social media listening: NetBase provides tracking of specific keywords including branded, competitive and topical terms (to gauge general chatter around set topics) across digital. NetBase supports content strategy development to ensure materials created for social channels align with what the target audience is interested in learning.
• Measurement and competitive benchmarking: Plug in your social channels against competitors through SocialBakers to get a sense of how you stack up in the industry. You can discover which specific campaigns, individuals and content perform best.

#6: The Team Should Be “Social”

Create awareness of your brand’s social presence to support the growth of your community and engagement rate online, and create appreciation among peers for how you manage your company’s digital brand presence.

Tips for getting your company involved in your social media presence:

Whether you’re a small or large organization, the social media task force is critical toensure content is published from a consistent voice on a regular basis. However, opening up the conversation to other employees creates a new platform and way of collecting points of view and content sources to support the content manager.

Set up an email alias specific to social media content submissions, curated by the content manager, to provide new content opportunities and fresh thinking on a regular basis.

Remind team members of their ability to contribute through company meetings and staff emails to energize and enable creativity.

• Initially, send out a staff email that features the social media team and captures what the group will be doing across digital to illuminate brand channels.
• Emphasize that company involvement is an important part of your brand presence. While you’ll be sending out notes periodically to facilitate brainstorming, you are interested in learning about who would like to participate in the brand’s social presence, which requires minimal involvement.
• Create a Google document to send out in this email and encourage employees to log their name in this document, with their favorite part of social media (some might be more interested in brainstorming; others have a soft spot for analytics).
• Work with these individuals and the social media task force to support day-to-day and campaign-related activities. Make participation easy for them. Ask simple questions and provide easy ways to respond.

Send out monthly staff emails with top-performing content or announcements you would like employees to propagate. If you request sharing of specific content across employee social media channels, draft 1-2 sample posts for easy copy and paste.

Add brand social media channels to your company signature with hyperlinked URLs, encouraging other employees to do so. If you are a part of a larger organization, altering the official signature may require coordination with HR.

Add links to social media accounts to your company email signature.

Regardless of where social media sits within your company, craft simple-to-digest emails to send off to executives and senior leadership. This keeps them in the know about what is happening across social.

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How to Create a Social Media Strategy

Many businesses are unsure of how to effectively leverage social media as part of their marketing efforts. Some merely post messages once a year on their Facebook fan page or on Twitter only to say that social media ‘didn’t work’ for them.  For a small business with limited resources, it might be difficult to hire in-house or even outside social media help, so they continue to blindly navigate the waters.  It pains me to see this, so I’ve decided to share a formula we use for our clients when determining their social media strategy.  My hope is that small business owners can use this as a template for getting started with an effective social media plan.

Determine marketing goals.  Get clear about the specific objectives you want to achieve. We all want more clients and more money, but consider the steps it takes to get the business leads that result in more business. Reasonable online marketing goals could include: increase in website traffic or foot traffic to your location, increased customer feedback on social sites, and generating more email opt-ins.  

List your current marketing outlets.  Review this list and consider what can be integrated to maximize the use of social media. For example, if you use direct mail, could you add the links to your Facebook fan page or Twitter handle? If time or money is a concern, also consider what marketing activities can be shifted or replaced with social media. If you’re running costly print ads in a local newspaper, but find you’re not getting the results you want, would it be reasonable to start to shift some of those funds to hiring part-time staff to manage your social media?

Determine your target audience or ideal client. It’s important to identify exactly who you want to reach in order to develop a solid plan of action. Be as specific as possible. Consider industry, gender, age, purchase habits, income level, education level, etc.  For the purpose of this blog, let’s say that your plan is to target brides.

Decide on the message. Now that you’ve established your goals and decided on your audience, it’s time to determine how you plan to reach them.  What do you have to say? What value can you offer?  Using brides as an example, you may want to inform them of ways they can save money and still have the wedding of their dreams.

Determine channels for reaching your audience. Where is your audience?  If you are targeting brides, you might find that more brides are using Pinterest or watching YouTube videos.  You could display DIY boards on Pinterest. You might create short video clips with money saving tips. You could even feature video testimonials of brides who have used your service and saved money. For small businesses doing it themselves, I recommend starting out with no more than two social media channels.

Set a 90-day plan.  It’s tempting to try to do it all, but in order to remain consistent, you must start small.  If you’ve decided to use Pinterest and YouTube, a reasonable 90-day plan could include building your social media community on these channels (remember to use your traditional or offline marketing avenues to help you get started) and engaging that audience with consistent, compelling content.  

Develop an editorial calendar. Now it’s time to get specific on what you’ll do in that 90-day plan.  Develop a theme or focus-area for each month. Determine the type of content you’ll post and frequency of the content.

Build a maintenance schedule. This is where we get to the nitty-gritty.  Create a maintenance calendar of daily, weekly, monthly, and as-needed tasks. Consider things like monitoring the accounts and responding to the audience, continuing to build the audience, and writing the content for the day, week or month.

Assign responsibilities. If you’re like many business owners, you might intend to do it all yourself. But I find that’s not always realistic. Be sure to assign a specific person to each task – even if it is you. Also consider the time involved in completing each task so you can schedule your time appropriately.

Evaluate.  After 90 days, review your progress. Were your goals met? Did you reach your intended audience?  What worked and what didn’t work?  Should you shift your focus or maintain what you’ve done? Are there other forms of media you want to consider?  Be honest with yourself about these results and adjust your social media plan accordingly.

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