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5 Tips for Creating More Efficient Social Media Processes
-from Mashable.com
Creating, executing and evaluating a social media plan takes a healthy amount of time, money and talent — resources that are scarce in today’s business world.
Mashable spoke with Altimeter Group Industry Analyst Jeremiah Owyang and Intel Social Media Strategist Ekaterina Walter to get their thoughts on how businesses can save time, money and other valuable resources by creating more efficient social media processes. Here are five essential tips.
1. Utilize Your Existing Team
“Leverage your front-line workers who already support customers in different mediums like live chat, phone, and in person,” says Owyang. “Use the support and customer service teams that already know your products and services and have been trained in customer relations. Take a page from Best Buy’s ‘Twelpforce‘ that empowered thousands of retail professionals to take to Twitter than just train a new social savvy workforce.”
Tread lightly when figuring out how to organize social media efforts, though. Walter says that too much time is spent “fighting over who owns what” when developing a social media strategy. “Different stakeholders (PR, web, legal, privacy, security, marketing, HR, etc.) need to partner on this and work closely together on the structure and processes that are beneficial to everyone,” she says.
Walter suggests against “putting [social media practitioners] into a box with too many guidelines,” and instead is all for “unleashing the employee potential and giving them some freedom to engage online.”
2. Build a Plan That is Nimble
While a triage system can be helpful for novice social media programs, make sure your communication process isn’t complicating problems. After all, social media is meant to make communications easier, not more tedious.
Walter says, “The biggest issue is the amount of time it takes to make a decision internally. It is a time of ‘now marketing,’ or what I call ‘agile marketing’ — we cannot afford to spend too much time making decisions or creating elaborate processes of approval. We need to act quickly and nimbly; otherwise, the opportunity is gone forever. This is the biggest hindrance to digital creativity.”
“Most companies like an effective triage system to pass information around the company directing who will respond and how,” says Owyang. “As a result, more than one business group may respond to customers — reducing efficiency and of course, potentially confusing customers.”
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