Watch Madeline Berges - instructor for the University of San Francisco’s Internet marketing programs - discuss how to put together a successful plan to navigate social networks, leverage established best practices and support building your brand.
Peter: Okay, we're going to go ahead and get started. On behalf of University Alliance and the University of San Francisco's Internet marketing program, I would like to welcome you to our webinar, Social Media Strategy: A Checklist for Success. We appreciate you taking the time to sit down with us today. I'm Peter Contardo, program director for the University of San Francisco's Internet marketing program, and we're excited to bring you this webinar on social media strategy.
We've got a great presentation lined up from one of our online program instructors that I'm sure you'll enjoy. But before we get started, we need to get a little housekeeping out of the way. This audio for the webinar is set to listen only, so your microphone should automatically be on mute when you join the conference
However, we do want to hear from you, so I encourage you to submit your questions using the chat feature at any time during the presentation. I'll be collecting the questions for our presenter and then facilitating the Q&A after the main presentation. To use the chat, type into the chat panel located to the right of your main screen, or if you are viewing in full screen mode, you can access it by mousing up near the top of the screen and selecting the chat panel.
As far as our agenda is concerned, after my brief introduction we'll hear from our presenter and then we'll have time for some Q&A before wrapping things up. We've allocated an hour for this webinar including the Q&A portion, and we'll be recording this session and providing access to it at a later date. We know that there's no single time of day that we'll meet everyone's schedule, so we certainly appreciate all of you joining us live as well as those playing this recording for the first time. Now let's get started.
Social media by its very nature is always changing. There is a steady stream of new opportunities and challenges that need to be addressed by organizations and marketing professionals on a constant basis. As just one example, who would have thought we'd see social media marketers spending their summer trying to figure out the lessons learned from a bunch of people, and some pretty high profile ones, dumping buckets of ice on their heads for charity?
It's no surprise that some of our most popular training programs are our professional certificates in social media. From our advanced professional certificate in Internet marketing and social media to our advanced specialized certificate and even our mini course in social media, we know that there is a big demand for knowledge and training in this critical area. Judging from those who have registered for this webinar, that demand spans the spectrum, from entrepreneurs and startups to small businesses, Fortune 500s and non-profits, and in industries such as consumer electronics, advertising, real estate, food and travel, and from all across the globe.
We have people attending from California to Canada and from Haiti to Jordan, across a variety of job titles and functions. Social media is an integral part of digital marketing. What we did was ask one of our subject matter experts and online program instructors to pull together a presentation on social media strategy that we could share with you in the form of this webinar outside of our online classroom for the very first time.
What are we going to cover today in Social Media Strategy: A Checklist for Success? We'll help you identify what you need to do for a successful and sustainable social media strategy. We'll highlight specific tools that help you monitor what is being said about your brand 
and steps to take to create compelling content.
We'll discuss the resources and processes required to manage social media inside your organization, and along the way provide tips that you can add to your own social media checklist for success. We hope you enjoy this presentation and it piques an interest in learning more about our programs in social media and other areas of internet marketing.
With that as background, it is my pleasure to introduce today's presenter, Madeline Berges, USF online program instructor. Madeline has been involved with our social media program and Internet marketing program for several years both as a subject matter expert, having produced many of the video lectures in the program, and as a current instructor and facilitator for our online sessions. In addition, she is vice president of E-Commerce and Digital Marketing for Interval International, one of the world's leading timeshare companies. Now I'll send it over to Madeline.
Madeline: Good afternoon, everybody. I hope everybody is doing well, and I'm glad you were able to join us today for this webinar. Let's go ahead and get started.
As the vice president of E-Commerce and Digital Marketing, I am involved in the day to day business of all of our social media efforts. Everything that I'm talking about here are things that we are actually managing and monitoring and implementing over on our end, which has made us successful. Social media must be part of a company's overall marketing mix. One second. I'm sorry. My mouse is a little stuck. One second. Sorry.
Okay. Social media has to be part of a company's overall marketing mix. It basically allows you the ability to have a multidirectional conversation with your customers as opposed to a traditional marketing where you broadcast messages to your customers without really allowing for feedback or responses. It's used to turn communications into interactive dialog between a company or a brand, their communities, and the individuals.
Social media is designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation. That's really the key. In order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and, let's say, a transparent business environment, this is the area you have to be in. You can't simply dabble in social media. You can't use your customers, let's say, when things are good. You have to deal with the good and the bad.
The upside of being a transparent company and being transparent with your customers is because of the good and the bad, because the good far outweighs the bad and the negativity, because in crisis is where there's opportunity to shine on how it is that we deal with a crisis,
and that's where the customer service comes in. Nowadays, customers really expect to be able to access your company in real time on any given channel and be able to offer feedback, their comments, any questions, complaints, also the praise.
Your relationship with your customer continues to increase in importance. Social media is truly a great way to be where your customer feels most comfortable and help you develop strong connections with them.
Before we get started, I want to review something with you. We all believe that we know how social media platforms work and that they're out there. We all just know. We think this because it's coming from a personal perspective. I thought it would be helpful if we talk about each platform from a communications perspective on how a brand would leverage each of these platforms.
While there are so many social media platforms out there, I only took the most popular ones from this image you'll see here. I'm only focused on the top ones, so I created this slide based on that. You may see something similar out there in terms of dogs and cats and people who have even done it with donuts, but I decided to do it with cocktail. I'm in travel, so we enjoy vacation.
Essentially, if you take a look at this slide, you'll see in terms of positioning, if you're on Facebook, you would essentially say "like" if you are a fan of poolside cocktails. Twitter, the positioning would essentially be poolside cocktails with the best cocktail ever. #TheBestCocktailEver. Pinterest would be something to the effect of, here's how you make your own poolside cocktail.
Instagram is, here's a vintage photo of my #PoolsideCocktail. Google+ is hangout with my circle of friends drinking poolside cocktails. YouTube is, watch me make signature poolside cocktails. LinkedIn, I'm an expert cocktail mixologist, and so forth, and Foursquare.
The idea here is to help you understand that it isn't a one size fits all content. You can't decide to go on four of these platforms and say you're going to use the same content on each one. The positioning has to fit the platform because of your audience and why they're on there and the purpose of the platform.
You've always heard that content is king on your website. Well, for social media, content includes both images and copy. However, images speak volumes way over the content. On social media, content is about 90% visual, 10% copy. The goal of social media for your brand is to really garner participation from your followers, and then you encourage behavior.
Social media is an important channel of your overall marketing mix as I just mentioned, but your main objective is to stay informed with what your customers are saying about your brand and to look at ways that you could join that conversation in a useful way. The way to do that is by - you want to increase brand awareness and buzz around your brand. That's one of the elements that you have to focus on. How you're going to show your brand awareness and how you're going to create that chatter. Rich imagery does that./p>
Then you also want to communicate more effectively with your customers about your brand and your brand's products. The idea here is that you're going to want to talk to what your products are, what your customers are interested in, and what those products are. Not necessarily selling, because that's very frowned upon. You're in somebody's personal space. But rather something that they can relate to to get them to engage with you. I'm not saying that you can't on occasion sell, but it's really not the primary purpose, unless you're doing advertising, of course.
You also want to learn more about what your customers think about your company, to really understand what it is that they're looking for. One of the things that if you go out there, if you're not listening to what is being said about your company, you can go out there and let's say the voice of the brand or positioning that you've decided to focus on is completely opposite of what people are saying about your brand, and you can find yourself in a lot of deep water. You want to research and find out what people think of your company.
Then you want to educate your customers about your company and your industry overall. What does your brand do? What kind of products do you have? You want to share with them, again, not sell.
Also, on social media, you want to resolve customer service issues through the social channels, because typically if one person is having an issue, more people are having the same issue. By resolving these on social media, everybody is seeing what the resolution is. Of course, I press to say that this would remove anything with personal information. If you need somebody's phone number, you would take that into some kind of private messaging.
But essentially, if somebody states a concern or a question, if you could answer that and respond publicly, you're educating everybody who's watching. Then, of course, you want to gain followers through these channels, because that's how you are able to ultimately start really leveraging the vast audience that you have in order to promote your product.
You want to start by finding out what currently is being said about your brand. Understand what are the chatters going on out there. Establish what your brand is, and maintaining it really requires commitment on your company's part. Also, it's much easier to damage your brand online than it is the build it, so you want to make sure that you're listening to what's being said about your company and that you respond when and where it's appropriate, because not everything has to be responded to.
Your customers are speaking about your brand. You want to make sure you listen. You need to manage your online reputation before it becomes a problem. In order to do that, you want to find a tool that can help you monitor online chatter. You can use them to monitor not only your chatter, but also what's being said about your competitors and see what's happening with them. It provides an enormous amount of deep insight.
If your competitors are falling short on something and if you move quickly, maybe that's something that you can develop or get the edge on above your competitors if they've come out with a new product. So it's not just listening to what's being said about you. You can listen to what's being said about your competitors as well. Like I said, knowing what people are saying about your company will really help you structure your approach and help you address certain areas that your company might be struggling with before you launch your presence.
There are many free listening tools out there that can help you understand what's being said about your company. I just picked a couple of the top ones. Again, these are some free tools. Hootsuite, they're one of the largest, best social media engagement tools available out there, and it covers multiple social networks. It covers Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, WordPress, things like that nature. But some of these networks only focus on a particular platform.
Hootsuite really covers a very broad spectrum of social channels, and it could be really useful when there is more than one person handling your social media accounts, because you're able to go in there. It gives you weekly analytics. They have an excellent team management that's going to be able to help you with what it is that you're trying to do.
Then there's TweetReach. TweetReach could be the right tool for your business if you're interested in monitoring how long your tweets travel. It manages the reach. It helps you understand what's going on with that. If you're on Twitter, then this is something that you should certainly take a look into, because it can help you find out who are your influential followers, who are the ones that are chatting. You can drill down to the particular person and how many times people are saying or mentioning your brand.
Then there's another product out there called Klout. Klout is probably one of the most controversial social media analytic tools, so you would have to see if it fits your business. We took a look at it in my company and we decided not to go with it, but that doesn't mean that it's not of value. Depending on your product and your business, this might be for you. There are a lot of people who hate it, that claim that it's a scoring system and it's completely inaccurate and they're trying to basically get people to use it.
But on the other hand, some people really find it useful, because it measures influence through the engagement on Twitter, for example, and people you should be keeping an eye out because they're talking the most about your brand. People who are actively engaged in social media, whatever platform there. These are the talkers. These are the people who people are listening to. You're able to get an idea of the people who are influencers about your brand.
Then there's another tool called Social Mention. Social Mention is pretty popular. It basically monitors over hundreds of social media sites. This is another broad one. It's probably one of the best free listening tools out there, because it also has an in-depth analysis component, and it measures influence as well. They measure strain, sentiment, passion, and reach, and they have different ways that you fall into these buckets. But this is a very powerful tool as well.
Then there's Twazzup. It's a funny way of saying it. This is a great tool for beginners looking for, let's say, a Twitter monitoring tool. You just basically enter the name that you want to track and you're instantly given realtime updates, meaning the most active top influencers, what photos and links, what's most important, the top keywords, things of that nature. Not much analytics, but it still lets you know what's happening now.
Then there's Addictomatic. If you're aiming for an overall view of the brand, this might be useful for you, because it's pretty much as straightforward as Twazzup. The only difference between this one and Twazzup is it has a variety of platforms, like it includes Flickr and YouTube, WordPress, in addition to, of course, Twitter, Google, and things of that nature. It's really useful for keeping an eye on recent, let's say, industry developments or your brand reputation and things like that.
Then there's another tool called HowSociable. This is pretty handy for measuring your and, of course, always, your competitor's social media presence. Again, it's free to track about 12 social media sites including Tumblr and WordPress, but if you're interested more in, let's say, 24 more or whatever that is, like let's say Pinterest and Facebook, then you have to have an account. That is required. There's a free level and then there is an upgraded level that you have to pay for.
Then there's TweetDeck. Now, TweetDeck covers the basic needs for any Twitter user. It's a really good option for beginners also. It's a great tool for scheduling tweets and monitoring your interactions with the messages as well as tracking hashtags and managing these multiple accounts. However, it kind of lacks regular updates, but again, depending on where you're starting or where you are in your social media products, this might be something for you.
These are just a couple of samples. There are also paid solutions out there. Some of these have paid portions, paid products that would give you more. However, if you're just starting, I would say that you would start something that is free so you can understand the volume and the management resource of how these tools work. That way, you can plan on how you can manage or monitor it, what it's going to take for you to manage and monitor from a resource perspective.
Then if you feel that you need more, then, of course, go ahead and choose a paid platform. But again, depending on your needs, if you're not sure how it works and all that stuff, start with something free. It will help you a lot to understand what's going on out there.
Then, next you want to create and monitor content. You essentially want to create a process for developing content. You want to first establish the voice of your brand. Let's say you want your brand to be fun and informative and lighthearted. You always want to make sure that the tone of the content posted is consistent with the tone that you've chosen.
One of the things that is really important in social media that I'm sure you all have noticed on your own personal feeds is that it has to be personal. People don't like to be spoken at. It's a very friendly environment. It's their private space.
You have to talk to them like if you're talking to a friend of yours. Whatever that tone is, whether you're a funny company or a serious company, whatever that is, you're still talking to a relative or a friend. So establish whatever that tone is, and then make sure that your content carries that tone of voice.
In addition, you want to create different levels of permission for different users and departments. Let's say for example, if you go outside of your company to help support your efforts, let's say you're not going to do this internally, because your company simply doesn't have the resources, then you have to decide who you're going to allow to post on your behalf. Should posting only happen by the lead marketing person, yet your agency is telling you what to post?
Those are the kinds of things that you want to figure out, because ideally, if you do it internally, you would need to establish who will be the primary person posting or responding publicly. This should be a central source. Not many people should have access to this, because it would create confusion, and you want to maintain one brand voice. The idea is not so much to control.
A lot of companies think they're being too controlling, the departments. Mine would be one of them. But it's not so much that as opposed to having control in terms of who can do damage to your brand. How many people have access in terms of they're able to talk on behalf of your brand? You definitely want to streamline that and the fewer the people that can do that on behalf of your company, the easier it is to manage and monitor it.
Then you want to remember, when you're creating content, the main focus here is to help engage and entertain your customers, not just to push new deals or products, and of course, like I mentioned earlier, we're not focused on selling here. The engagement's going to come, but we have to do it in a manner of which you're not offending and you're not constantly selling to them, because they can easily unlike you or unfollow you.
Here are some steps you can take to create the appropriate content while you ensure you support your primary objective for your company. You want to conceptualize ideas. By this, I mean you want to lay out your plan of the types of content that you would or could include in your social media.
One thing I want to say here is that none of social media should be done on the fly. This is all pre-planning and have content calendars and content. All of this should be reviewed by whoever needs to be part of the process, and then you are able to go ahead and post, but we don't do this on the fly. This is all pre-planned and there's a strategy.
Okay. Then you want to create your content. You can either do this from scratch, if you have a writer on deck, or there's a lot of tools that you have out there. You can leverage content on your website. You can leverage any printed material that you have. You can leverage email copy. Then all you have to do is adapt that message to social media.
That way you don't have to have somebody who's writing copy from scratch every time, scratching their head saying, "Goodness. What am I going to write about today or for this next month's calendar?" Again, leverage the content that you already have established and then adapt it for social environment.
The next is you want to edit content for accuracy and tone. You want to make sure you're following your brand's tone of voice and your personality for social. Whatever that content that you're picking up, you have to automatically adjust it to make sure that it's covering the tone. For example, in my company, we have printed material and magazines and things of that nature and on the website.
All that content has a different positioning and a different tone than what we use on social. Just because of the nature of the channel, it has to have a different tone. But when you change something, you have to be careful that you don't change the accuracy by changing the tone. That's what I mean by that.
Okay. Then depending on how large your company is, you want to get approvals of content for publication. Some companies, again, like mine, require approvals and reviews. Our legal department is involved. Whenever a department or a group need to review the content, they should be involved as part of the process.
It's going to make things much easier as opposed to one day you post something and somebody didn't read it, and maybe the person creating the post wasn't sure if that's accurate or not. You want to make sure the right people in your organization are part of the review process to make sure, is this accurate? Do we still have this product? Is this how we position it? Things of that nature.
Okay. Then, of course, there's uploading and publishing content. Once you do that, you want to monitor the engagement of your post with the content to ensure that you're talking with your audience about what they're interested in. If you're doing this in a vacuum and you're creating content from a business perspective of, this is what I want to talk about, because this is what's important and this is what I find important, things like that.
When you're not watching what your customers or what your fans or followers are doing, you're going to lose your audience. If you follow this process when you upload content, you have to see, are people liking it? Are they sharing it? Are they commenting on it? If they are, fantastic. Keep going down that path.
If they're not, then you have to constantly be tweaking it and see what they are interested. Try something different. Try a different positioning. Try a different image, like that.
Next, you want to promote across marketing channels. Once you've established your preferred social media platforms, whatever you choose that's appropriate for your business, you basically want to ensure you communicate where you can be found on all of your traditional channels. Make sure your emails have social media icons that you're on. Your website, any printed material, magazines, mailers, anything that you're doing outside of social media, you want to make sure you let your customers know which social media platforms you're on.
Then, of course, you want to respond to your user feedback regarding the content. If you receive feedback on any of your posts or anything like that, you want to establish a process for engaging your customers and responding to them. Is it a complaint? If it's a complaint, can you handle it in your area or should you push that over to customer service? Not that they should respond publicly.
Only one person or whatever designated people should do that, but you have to get them involved in terms of, "Hey, is this correct? What do we do with this? How do we address it?" If it's positive and they say, "Oh, I just went there. I just went on this trip and I went there," and they're engaging with what you said, you want to thank them and say, "Glad you loved it. Thank you for sharing." That kind of thing.
If somebody posts a picture of some product that they love, that they used of yours, then you want to respond to that and engage them and thank them for that. It's not just the bad, but it's also the good. You have opportunity on both ends.
Okay. Then you have more spontaneous user-generated content. As Peter mentioned in the beginning, things like the ALS ice bucket challenge. Now, this one, you've seen your friends, family, celebrities, athletes, you might have even done it, teams. Basically, everybody
is joining in in this whole social media explosion.
I don't know if you know this, but the ice bucket challenge has totally been an Internet sensation, but really, more importantly, it's a fundraising success. I'm not sure if you know this, but this massively viral sensation wasn't even initiated by ALS. It was started by a friend of an athlete who has ALS and they decided to say, "Hey, do this. Donate and share it with three friends," and it took off from there. Now, we have, as marketers, major takeaways from this. This is user-generated content.
What do we do as a brand with this content, and why is it so successful? Well, number one, it's very compelling. A brand, I don't believe, and many people don't believe if you were to research online, a brand would not be able to pull this off, because it wouldn't seem genuine. This is not a brand initiation at all.
Another reason that it's so successful is because it plays on emotions, both happy and sad. You're laughing at your friends. At the same time, wow, what a terrible disease.
It basically includes a call to action to giving people 24 hours to do one or the other. People are using their mobile phones, which makes it really easy to shoot the video and simply post it up. There's certainly risk for the brand, but in this particular case, this was a landslide win for ALS, and so far it's generated over $70 million in donations. Interestingly enough, apparently, I read a statistic that same time last year in terms of donations they had, like, $1 million.
So this massive viral campaign was homegrown user-generated. What's the idea here? Try to see if you can leverage user-generated content. How can you be part of the program? You know what I mean? #IceBucketChallenge. You know what I'm saying? How could you incorporate that and bring it in so you are being a part of the conversation and embracing it? They've had to move.
Again, we can all learn from this. While we have little control over user-generated content, we need to embrace it or manage it depending on which angle it's coming from. Then we want to use it to your advantage.
With that said, another important piece is you want to consider establishing or developing an internal process. For example, a content process would be let's say you want to start efforts with posting content on each and every platform daily. What's your calendar look like? What can you manage with the staff that you have in place?
Something really important to consider is, as I mentioned earlier, social media is not something that you should dabble in, meaning it isn't somebody that should be doing this as a side job. It should be somebody's full focus, because if you're doing it dabbling, your people will notice, you won't garner the engagement, you'll lose the momentum, and you're really not going to get anything out of it other than yeah, okay, I have a social media presence.
You want to start efforts with posting the content and how often are you going to do that. Can you do it once a day? Can you do it three times a week, four times a week? What's that rhythm?
Then you want to review the content and the chatter on each platform daily. Make sure you're watching what's happening. What is it that people are saying? How people are engaging with you. Somebody has to keep reading this all the time, because what happens with in social media there isn't a long shelf life.
Depending on the content on somebody's news feed, the typical expected time is anywhere between three to four hours. Maybe less, depending on how many people they're following. If somebody posts something or has a question, you can't come back six hours later and respond to them. They'll know that you're not monitoring and it can be frowned upon. You definitely want to have some kind of monitoring management process implemented.
You also want to ensure that the appropriate reviewers know who's responsible for responding to a post or who's responsible for the overall posts which lead to conversation. Who is it that's managing this information? Then make sure everybody in your organization knows who that is so they know who the point of contact is and they're not calling each other trying to figure it out, somebody goes out to try to proactively post something without your knowledge. It's really important to be able to streamline these processes.
In addition, you also want to establish a troubleshooting strategy for worst case scenario, crisis time. Customers who post negative or profane content, security breaches, an error with the content, things of that nature. What happens if there's a national disaster? What does your company do? Because if you have a national disaster, let's say today or this morning, and this afternoon you're posting...
Let's say there was a national disaster. I live in Florida. Let's say there was a massive hurricane and all kinds of people were affected and this and that. A company decides to post. Let's say us. We decide to post, because we have these automatic posts that's saying, "Come to Florida for your best family beach vacation." People are going to say, "Seriously?" You know what I'm saying?
You have to be able to be ready to acknowledge and react to what's going on, not just to the positive and negative content, but also to what's going on in the world. Disasters. What do you do? Do you change your cover to have more of a corporate look and feel to be respectful as opposed to trying to push product and get engagement? Things of that nature.
Because of all of these things, what you also want to do is you want to consider establishing social media policies. Now, social media policies would... The reason you want to do this is because now that you're doing all this engagement and rules of engagement and who can talk and when do you talk and what do you say if there's a problem, you want to make sure that your employees internally understand what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.
This is one of my favorite clip arts. It's a lot of fun. You see Robin posting. He's checking in, basically is what's he's doing. Batman is yelling at him and saying, "Stop checking in. This is supposed to be a secret, where you are." That's really important, because if you're at a company and your employees are posting where they are, maybe that's okay. I don't know. But it's really something that your company has to establish in terms of...
For example, Starbucks. Starbucks allows their barristas to post on behalf of the company. There are other companies who have social media departments who control that, such as my own, in terms of who can post. Not everybody can post. However, we include most of the company to make sure that they can post.
A social media employee policy is essentially going to allow you to communicate to your employees what is okay and what is not okay. That way you're on the same page, because if Robin didn't receive a social media policy for employees, who's to know? He can simply say, "Well, nobody ever told me I'm not allowed to do this." That kind of thing. You want to be able to have some kind of policies in place for your employees.
You also want to think about establishing some social media guidelines, consumer facing, meaning, how do you expect your customers to engage? Most companies have kind of like a terms and conditions of engagement on their pages to be able to communicate in terms of what's going to be acceptable and what's not going to be acceptable. You're going to remove somebody's post if they talk like this. You're going to do this if they block you. That's short and sweet, a couple paragraphs, but it should be there.
Then you also want to have rules of engagement, because let's say, while maybe your social media team thinks it's okay to do something, maybe somebody in HR, the legal department would think, "No, you shouldn't have responded to that." What are our rules? Build some kind of foundations for your social media group to be able to maneuver in these waters without having to constantly ask for permission. They should be able to stand alone and know what the rules are and then be able to engage.
In addition, we all have day jobs. We all have things that are going on. What happens when there's a problem? What happens when the social media lead team or whoever it is that's posting has a problem? There needs to be escalation protocols.
The reason for that is because if I'm having a crisis right now and I need to talk to somebody, let's say, in my PR department or my legal department or something like that and they're not available because that one person is on vacation and the other guy is out sick or something like that, there has to be a process set in place in terms of who's going to respond, how quickly the turnaround is. I can't wait 24 hours until the guy gets back tomorrow. I need to respond now. Those procedures and escalation protocols are really going to help you establish, okay, if this, then that, and if this, then that.
Then, of course, as I mentioned earlier, the crisis management component. The crisis management piece is really important. What do you do if you have a tsunami? You know what I'm saying? Or a major national tragedy or things of that nature. How do you handle it? How long do you wait for the crisis to not post or to be careful of your posts or to watch your posts?
All of this should be pre-established. That way your social media department or people or person knows exactly how to handle it and what the company has agreed to collaboratively. It's not just one person deciding what they feel like doing. It's not their pet project. It needs to be a company, organization decision, and everybody needs to be able to understand what that is.
Okay. Once you've established all these things, another thing you want to do is you want to decide where you're going to focus your social media efforts. While the thought is to be wherever your audience is, you should focus where you would get the most exposure for your effort. Here's the reason why. We can't be awesome at everything. You want to be fantastic or amazing at the ones you can focus on.
Where is the majority of your audience? Some brands are across. For example, based on the industry one, here you want to focus on communicating things like industry or company achievements, press releases. Information from this can really be gathered by, let's say, public relations or human resources or even your B2B marketing. That, of course, would be things like LinkedIn, maybe Twitter, and even maybe Facebook. Facebook, let's face it, might have all the areas, but still you want to see what other areas you can have.
Another one you're talking about is, let's say, brand. For brand, announcing new products, company achievements, things of that nature. This is the core. This core information would probably come from your consumer marketing group or your public relations. This would be something like maybe Twitter or Facebook. There are many platforms out there, so I'm just going to give you an example.
Depending on what you're and then of course your competitor... What's your competitor doing? We always want to know what they're doing. Not necessarily to copy them, but to mainly differentiate yourself from them. Be informed, know what's happening, and know how to separate yourself from them. That's a really important component.
There are many, many platforms out there. Think of your business. Are you a B2B? Then you should probably be on LinkedIn and maybe Facebook. Can you handle too much? Then of course Google+. Google is almost requiring every business to have a Google+ page simply because of the search engine, so you know you're going to be on that one.
Do you have a lot of images? If you have a lot of images for your product, then I would say Instagram might be great for you. If you have a lot of information or how-tos or you want to... Let's say you're Home Depot and you're going to create a whole page on Pinterest on how to do things. Again, then Pinterest would be a great option for you. You basically want to decide what your business is. Based on that, you'll be able to find where your customers are.
Then, next what you want to do is you want to develop a team. Based on your goals, your team may consist of let's say... What I mean by team are the teams who are going to be contributing. It could be your marketing department. Given that marketing currently manages, let's say, your consumer communication, emails or the website, this might be a very powerful group to help you with content, new content, product changes, and things of that nature. This person would essentially be a lead for that department which would help your group, the social media group, provide the content on what's happening within the company.
You also have customer service. Should you continue to support customer issues, but, let's say, add a social media component to their roles? While they're still taking the phone calls and still answering emails from your website, what role are they playing in terms of complaints that are coming in from your social media? Are they being fed the information or are they proactively seeking the information on social media, on your social media pages?
Again, these are the areas you want to be able to establish. There are many more areas. You can have your sales department involved in terms of what is it that they're doing. Definitely your PR. Do you have a conference that you're talking about or some major development in the company? Things of that nature. Think through what it is, the major communication aspects, and who you're going to be talking to. That's really going to help you on who you need to develop as part of the team.
In addition, you basically want to establish the frequency, as I mentioned earlier, of the content posting. When you create your content calendar with deadlines, you need to include deadlines and a task for each post. The overall goal here is to produce great content as often as possible. Essentially, you want to review and revisit that social media strategy that you had put together in terms of what you are going to say, how are you going to say it, and things like that.
You want to take a look at that every six months. Is that approach still working? Have you matured enough where, let's say you were in fan acquisition mode and now you have critical mass. Now you want to switch to fan acquisition mode and engagement mode. Where are you in your cycle of social media? Take a look at your plan every six months and then make the adjustments based on the environment, the maturity of your social media platform, and how well the engagement is going.
With that, you want to create deadlines that are going to keep content timely. It's extremely important, without making unreasonable demands on your resources. What does that mean? Am I posting three times a day? Am I posting once a day, four times a week? Whatever that is, find out what that is and stick to that.
Then you want to allow enough time to properly have content reviewed, like I mentioned before. You have to have this reviewed, because unless you are the owner of the company, and even then you might be missing some new developments, you're not an army of one. We cannot work in a vacuum. You have to bring in other people in your company so you can understand what else is going on in the company. Excuse me. Pros and cons and things of that nature.
Another idea is to have a monthly meeting with these key players in different departments that are important to your social media content to review upcoming posts or potential posts, and really let them help you determine the ongoing development and the direction of that future content. Then, of course, you always want to make the necessary changes to the workflow in any calendar if you have to. While everything is pre-established at least 30 days in advance, if things happen, you might have to change something that's happening tomorrow. So you have to be able to move and have a little bit of flexibility within that.
Here's a checklist of before you go live. These are things that you want to do. You want to set a launch date. A launch date is going to help you draw that line in the sand, because if you're anything like my company, and in a corporate company, things can go on forever, because there's always, "Oh, but this. Oh, but that." Set a date in the sand and make sure everybody is focused on meeting that launch date.
Then once you have that launch date, make it a soft launch. Don't announce it to anybody. Let's test quietly our internal process before the masses understand and know that we're on social media, because you want to make sure that everything is in place, customer service knows what to do, any escalation process is in place, and things of that nature. No announcements for a little while and then decide when you're going to go public.
Once you decide that and start letting everybody know, you want to include your social icons on relevant communications, like I mentioned. Add it to your emails, your website, your printed materials, any mailing that you have, commercials, whatever it is that you're into. Once you're ready, then you add it.
Again, always have 30 days worth of content. This is really going to save you in terms of you have that one guy call in sick. Then you're going to be covered.
Then you also want to ensure that you have all the creative assets. What I mean by that is creative assets is, along with copy, while you're focused on the copy, do you have an image to support it? Do you own that image? Do you have to buy an image? Do you have the rights to that image? Things of that nature. You have to be able to own all the assets that go along with that content and then go ahead and publish.
Once you're live, after your initial launch of your social media platforms, wherever you decide, you want to make sure that you're constantly monitoring and that you work to maintain your strategy. You want to identify any changes that need to happen. Again, this has to be reviewed at least every six months. Then if you decide if it has to be adjusted, so be it, but you have to be able to see how it's going.
Stay on message and stay true to your pre-established goals. It's very easy to get off track because of everybody saying, "Oh, I want to do this," and all the different stakeholders that want you to take a different direction, but you have to have a path. If not, you're going to get lost.
Again, you want to monitor if the resources in place are able to manage or execute the goals. Was your plan too aggressive? Is posting every day possible? Are they drowning in that because the customer issues or the questions or the research is taking too long? Maybe you have to dial back on that or increase resources. Something to that effect.
Then you want to determine if you are in the proper and appropriate platforms. You want to take a look and make sure that you keep your post’s engagement and see how that's working for you. Then, of course, you want to evaluate your initial posting frequency, as I mentioned.
Then, of course, lastly, a really important piece of this is to always be interesting, always be relevant, and absolutely be timely, because this is what's going to make your content engaging, because you don't want to ignore the fact that it's Valentine's Day. You didn't say anything about it. Or that it's Mother's Day or whatever holiday anybody happens to be acknowledging. You need to know where to draw the line. Again, be interesting, be relevant, and of course, at all times be timely. That's it on my end. Peter?
Peter: Well, that was great, Madeline. We certainly appreciate your insights on social media strategy. Clearly, in the given time you've covered a lot of ground, and clearly this is an area that deserves a lot of attention, and certainly we could spend days, as we do in our programs...
Madeline: Exactly.
Peter: ...breaking this down into very operational pieces that can be used for social media strategists. If you have any additional questions, please submit them through the chat at this time. While we're doing that, Madeline, I have a question in terms of from your perspective, given everything that's going on, what do you see as the biggest challenge for businesses in social media?
Madeline: Well, I strongly believe that the biggest challenge from all the people that I've talked to at conferences and things like that for businesses is really getting everyone in the company behind the effort. To be successful in social media, you really need to ensure that everyone involved, including your senior management, supports the effort. You need to establish those baseline rules of engagement, internal processes and policies, because this is going to help you educate everybody internally to help you ease possibly any anxiety that people may have internally and in your senior management.
These challenges are really essential. One thing you have to do is try to involve as many departments as you can. Try to keep everybody informed, because you don't want to work in a vacuum. That's really the biggest challenge, is making sure that you become the champion for social media within your organization.
Peter: I've got a question regarding social media efforts and having the ROI. How do we make sure that they drive results other than just follows and likes?
Madeline: Well, here's the thing. I'm sure you can do some research on Google to find out. However, again, I'm speaking from experience
and from speaking to other marketers who are actually doing this. The ROI. If you are trying to justify going into social media based on ROI, it's not going to happen. Followers and likes are absolutely, you're right, absolutely worth it. They're worth money. They're worth things to your brand.
However, the return on investment required as, let's say, for another marketing initiative would be to break even and then hopefully to make money on top of that. It isn't there initially. You have to be doing advertising, because social media, you can't just sell on social media. But yes, likes and followers are worth something, but you can't really explain to your company while on one end your website is making, I don't know, $1 million a year, but what is your social media strategy doing for you.
You cannot as part of your strategy include an ROI on it, unless of course you're doing advertising. All your advertising should absolutely have ROI, a possible promoted post. Promoted post, I wouldn't say it has an ROI, but the engagement level can help you. But again, it's all focused on brand and brand awareness. It's almost like advertising.
A lot of advertising, you can't put your finger on did it work? A lot of it is implied. It did work, because I went out there and I did a campaign and I got likes. Can you actually put a number on it? It's really difficult to do that, but you definitely want to increase your likes.
If you're doing promoted posts, which cost money, then you want to make sure that that actually works for you in terms of how many... You promoted a post. How many people saw it? How many people reached it? Did you get more likes and things of that nature?
But it's very difficult at this stage to prove, to come to a company and say, "Listen. I need to do this, and this is the ROI." I did not go that route. That is a very difficult route to prove. Peter?
Peter: Yeah, so one of the followup questions to that was, do you think the number of followers or likes will make a company famous? But I guess to your point, it really comes down to really making sure you understand the business objectives and making sure that that's aligned with your social media strategy so that it's something that... Famous for famous sake. That's one thing, but making sure that there's a business objective for your social media is really the only way you're going to ensure that you can measure some of these efforts. To your point, some are just pure branding and have to be measured in a different, perhaps some more subjective way versus objective.
Madeline: Exactly. That's absolutely true, because brand awareness is huge and extremely valuable, but it's hard to quantify. Yes, you want to make sure that you're increasing your audience consistently. Yeah, we all want to make sure, because at the end of the day when you're posting something, you're going to be top of mind and people are going to remember you as whatever it is that your product is, because you're coming up on their news feed. There's a lot to be said about brand awareness, which creates brand loyalty.
Peter: Right, right. Okay. Let's see. Time for one last question. What do you wish you knew about social media when you entered the field?
Madeline: What did I wish that I knew? Hindsight being 20/20, obviously, that's a great phrase, is the need for flexibility. One of the things that we did do on our end is because we're a large corporate company, we're publicly traded, so we had a lot of policies in place to make sure that we protect the brand, we protect the employees, we protect the environment and things of that nature in where we were talking.
What we didn't allow for was flexibility, which is one of my last points there in terms of when things happen, can I adjust? How do I adjust? Who do I go to in order to adjust? The bigger the corporation, the more red tape there is, so try to be flexible.
Again, obviously, we've since adjusted to that, but that became the initial... The hardest hurdle that we had to overcome was being able to be a little bit more agile versus all the structure that we put in place. While you still need the structure, also build in a little bit of elbow room to be able to adapt quickly.
Peter: All right. Well, I see we're coming up against the hour mark here. I wanted to thank everyone, and especially Madeline for your presentation on Social Media Strategy: A Checklist for Success. Of course, thank you to all who had the opportunity to join us. We will be making the recording available to our participants. We hope you found it useful as you develop and manage your own social media strategy.
If you'd like to learn more about how our professional development certificates in social media or any of the other online marketing programs that we have through the University of San Francisco can help you achieve your business or professional goals, please contact us at usanfranonline.com or call toll free . We have program representatives that are dedicated to this program, and they're available to answer your questions about the program.
Also interested in your feedback about this webinar. As I mentioned, this is the first time that we have taken the content outside of the classroom and made it available in this space, so we'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Again, this is Peter Contardo for University Alliance and the University of San Francisco's Internet marketing program, and that concludes our webinar. Thank you very much.
