Social networking began as a confusing mess for many growing companies. Since then, teams of web developers, internet service providers and engineers have simplified the experience through web apps, smart phone applications and user-friendly APIs.
Now the process of marketing your business through social media is easier than ever. This ease of use, however, has turned out to be a double-edged sword. With many one-touch solutions for creating social networking profiles, the web has become cluttered with a mess of business-related social media accounts blasting massive volumes of sporadic marketing messages.
This is a serious problem for any company with long-term social media marketing ambitions. Recent studies done by the Altimeter Group showed that companies with more than 1000 employees averaged over 39 Twitter accounts, 31 blogs and nearly 30 Facebook accounts or pages. What this equates to is patchy distribution of content and inconsistency in the image of a brand, resulting in mixed feelings from a business?s customers.
Consolidate Social Media Efforts
It is a common misconception that a company?s organizational architecture should be reflected in their social media campaign. That is, every department and every product will get its own Twitter and/or Facebook page, etc.
The sad realization is that a business?s web presence becomes separated into several, hard-to-follow, fragmented online communities. If your social media strategy is flooded with unnecessary accounts, you may eventually lose your captive audience. It is important to remember that nobody can manage several dozen pages simultaneously without exhausting unnecessary amounts of effort. As a result, many pages will become dormant, customer engagement will tank, and your online marketing strategy will suffer as a result. From a very practical viewpoint, some internet service providers may not be able support massive amounts of digital content.
Instead, your company?s online marketing campaign should implement a strict social media policy, one that outlines exactly what warrants the creation of a new social media page. You should also consider the amount and types of resources required to operate and maintain each social media account. If you?re able to minimize your social media strategy in terms of shear account volume, the costs of managing these accounts will go down, and your efforts will be more effective in the long-run.
Linking and Liking
Every social media campaign needs to identify a clear link and interaction structure. Effective link structure lets you clearly establish and assign significance of each individual social media account.
It?s important to do this as quickly and as efficiently as possible. This lets you map out a plan to gauge how you can best serve each micro-community associated with each social media account.
This also opens the door to assigning value to content as it relates to other pages. As you set this plan in motion, you can then re-purpose content across your multiple social media pages (text, video, infographics and tweets). As the social web becomes more cluttered with useless content, the practice of implementing good link structure technique will be social media?s saving grace.
Plan Before You Post
Finally, after consolidating all necessary social media accounts and putting a solid structure into place for linking and liking, it?s time to plan content. Many companies believe that just like in advertising, sheer volume equals success. The problem with publishing lots of content constantly, is that at some point, audiences will get sick of you.
Carefully planning content publishing initiatives is the best way to keep from burning out an audience and maintaining appeal. Many companies setup an editorial calendar, not unlike what magazines, newspapers and trade publications use. Simple, scheduled, and consistent messages will always reflect a business better than sheer volume. How does your social media campaign reflect your business?
* * *
Note: Photos courtesy of smemon and thecampbells via FlickR Creative Commons.
Source: http://soshable.com/social-media-reflection/
josef stalin new york giants kourtney and kim take new york anne hathaway news channel 5 nathan hale ohio state football
No comments:
Post a Comment