Social Media execution tips

New Year is often the time of year that new ways of working are suggested and implemented. For many, this New Year will be the time they finally get around to engaging with their customers online via Social Media. Matizmo has had vast experience of providing end-to-end social media solutions for business for a number of years. As such, we have seen plenty of companies start their Social Media plans instituting all manner of best practice and sadly, we have seen plenty make avoidable mistakes. How can you ensure that when you finally take the plunge and get online and using social networks that you start correctly?

1. Know what you want - It may sound simple to say but essentially if you don’t know what you want to achieve with your Social Media engagement then you are not going to know if any work has been successful or not. Before you so much as log on, know what your strategy is. This makes managing the process smoother.

2. Understand how you can make your task easier – Social Media engagement is not about you spending hours upon end tweeting into the wind. Yes, you have to set time aside for it but you should also take advantage of tools that allow you to engage on an automated level. Tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck allow you to monitor what is going on in your sector and schedule tweets for specific times. Therefore, once you have your plan in place and have written the tweets you want to send – you can automate them and thus free your time up to get on with other things.

3. Control the users – Everyone in your organisation has a stake in what you are doing with Social Media. That does not mean that they have to have full permission to go in and write what they, want when they want. Have a wide Social Media working group by all means but the controls to the status updates, twitter feeds or LinkedIn groups should stay with as few a number of people as possible. This stops information that is off message getting out and makes sure the process is managed centrally.

4. Congruence goes a long way – This is basic marketing 101. You have to make sure that the messages you are pushing via your Social Media platforms are congruent with the ones that you are pushing elsewhere. Further to this, be careful of how many messages you are pushing via these channels. Remember Social Media is about engagement – you can engage on topics around which you would normal do push marketing but all push, push, push is only going to push people away.

5. Measure Success – having defined what you want to achieve by engaging, you then have to track the success you are getting via the channel. There are tools on all the big sites that help you do this.  Familiarise yourself with them and track what you are doing against the impact it is having. Ensure that you have a time period in mind for evaluating how things are going. Three months would be a good place to start.

You will never mitigate all potential trouble spots when it comes to Social Media. That is the nature of the beast, it is like trying to put a collar and lead on a lion. However, if you start from a position of awareness and understanding you start out far more prepared than 95% of businesses. For further information or advice about how to start in Social Media contact the Matizmo team on 01285 643180.