Be A Success At Social Media

Are you struggling to see the worth in social media, is there any real return on the investment. Or is it just another drain on your company’s finances. If your are starting to ask these questions about your campaign then you may need to take stock and review the situation before it turns sour.

Step back from where you are currently and go back to the beginning and ensure you have a watertight strategy in place.

Number One – Be Yourself
Part of any social media strategy is going to be connecting with your potential customers. Try and compose posts that have personality, many companies post onto Twitter and Facebook via a piece of software that automates the process. This tends to leave the posts sterile, offering very little for customers to connect with. If you want social media to work don’t rely on automated posts, you will get more success from doing the posts manually – preferably with someone with a good sense of humour!

Number Two – Don’t Be Scared of Critisim
The worst thing you can do as a company online is to ignore unhappy customers. If they have a genuine problem and post it on your wall then reply and solve the issue. If it is something out of your control and the person is just hitting out at you, then be polite respond and try and help the best you can. By ignoring it it will only look to the casual viewer that you are guilty of whatever you have been accused of.
This recent VW Happy New Year post on facebook, one innocent little New Year’s Resolution post has ended badly for them. So far over 2000 people have made negative comments regarding VW’s ‘green’ policies and the VW response so far is non existent. Egg on face time.

Number Three- Build A Relationship
Does anyone enjoy talking to a pushy salesperson? I doubt it very much. So don’t be one online, sometimes post things just because you have something to say rather than because a product is on offer. Focus on striking up conversations, you want people to enjoy the interaction with you. You may well have to respond to the same old people again and again, but if you continue to interact with them your followers will grow and more poep will be made aware of your product/brand.

Number Four – Don’t Fall Silent?
Don’t let your interaction to suddenly stop, often in a business the responsibility is assigned to one individual. When that person goes on holiday then the online voice of the company falls quiet. Make sure you have cover arranged. The danger is that if you let it for a couple of weeks then it is easy for this to continue even longer.

It is perceived by many that working in social media is ‘fluff’ and not important – easy work if you can get it. However a well managed social media campaign requires a lot of hard work and creative thinking. It is not easy to generate a large volume of ‘updates’ for a company. It is important that the management team are aware of the work required to ensure that resource is allocated to it. Without taking it seriously the campaign will fail.

Number Five – Be noticed
You are doing this to get noticed so you can at least try and be interesting. Afterall you are trying to encourage people to talk about your product’s brand, posting updates that are mundane will not encourage people to like and share them.