Sometimes, the most
challenging part of setting-up social media accounts is
convincing your senior colleagues that it is a good idea! Here are
some tactics to help you out...The conversation is already happening
People are already talking about your brand and or
activities online – but if you're not actively monitoring social
media, you just don't know it, or if it is correct. There are lots of
tools, both free and paid for, to help you monitor
your reputation online. See what is being said, and make sure decision makers are aware of the frequency and tone of these conversations. Demonstrate the opportunities being missed.
Inform future communications efforts
By monitoring conversations that others are having
online, you can understand how effective your communications have
been to date – how well your key messages have been delivered and
understood; where you need to correct or reinforce information, and
so on.
Stakeholder database analysis
Analysing stakeholder databases can be a very powerful tool for convincing colleagues that social media is a must-do. Make a list of your top stakeholders, then simply list their social media presence and level of activity. Once you have identified where your stakeholders are present online, see how they are already interacting with each other. Mentionmapp.com is a free tool, that quickly provides you with a visual representation of who your stakeholders are talking to, and about which topics (you need to sign in with a Twitter account).Make your content shareable
Making your website content easy for your audiences to
share can help to demonstrate how actively they are participating in
social media. There are lots of free tools around, such as
addthis.com
which you can include on website pages, in email footers, newsletters
and press releases. These tools have reporting systems that let you
see how many times content has been shared, and accessed as a result
of those shares.
This will demonstrate two points: 1) your current
audience is actively using social media and 2) social media can be a
powerful way of amplifying your messages and extending audience
reach.
Adding statistics like this to your monthly
reports will serve as a passive reminder that social media should be
on the agenda.
Ask your audience
Asking your target audience(s) about their social
media use can be a powerful tool to convince colleagues that social
media is no longer a nice-to-do. This could be something simple, like
an online poll, or a questionnaire created in Survey
Monkey, which is free to use.
Referrals from social media channels
Free tools such as Google
Analytics can tell you all sorts of useful
information to help with your arguments for developing social media
channels, such as: number of referrals to your website via social
media channels and the number of visitors accessing your site via a
smart device.
Brand identity
Social media accounts are an important part of
brand identity. If you do not claim your accounts, somebody else may
do it for you in order to capitalise on your brand, or even to try to
sell it to you at a later date (this is known as cyber-squatting).
Search Engine rankings
Having your
website appear on the first page of Google is no longer simply about
keyword placement, or how much you are willing to pay for an
ad-placement. Google look at over 200 factors to determine whether
they should return your website content to users who search for given
phrases. Social media activity now plays an important role in
determining your credibility as a trusted online source – social
accounts linked to your domain; frequency of new content posted;
number of quality followers/subscribers, click-through-rate, and so
on.
Managing the risks
Resistance
to using social media can stem from the perceived or actual risk
associated with doing so:
- Creating a demand for services that there is not capacity to manage.
- Negative comments online about the brand, organisation, or individuals.
- Passwords being lost, shared, or accounts being hacked.
- Employees making defamatory remarks online – accidentally or intentionally.
- Security and governance concerns over data being held by third parties such as Twitter, or Facebook.
- Retaining ownership of online collateral, and so on.....
These risks
are all real, and it is important to address them in order to provide
reassurance about how they will be managed. Your social media policy
should outline known risks to the organisation, and the methods you
will use to mitigate them. It is important that the written policy is
well communicated and understood by individual employees before any
social media activity takes place. Here are some pointers to get you
started with developing
a social media policy.
Pilot projects
Rather than go for a
big-bang approach to social media, you may want to start with one
account and make sure you manage it as well as possible. Ensuring its
success will be the best way to convince colleagues of the value of
future social media use.
It can be useful to identify a specific project with a clear start and end date, and trial the use of social media as a communications channel for this. This is helpful because it legitimately allows the organisation to close the account after a fixed period of time. This means that if some of the risks identified above are realised, the social media account can be taken off-line after a short period of time without further risk to reputation.
Pilot projects also allow social media managers to
gain all important hands-on experience, both in terms of dealing with
the platform, and the types of responses received.