11 Difficult & Time-Consuming Ways To Boost Your Social Media Strategy
It takes effort, engagement and a big dose of endurance to be great at any kind of communication.
I’m tired of posts that share ‘X easy ways to boost your social media strategy’. Being great at communication is never easy. Sorry, but it isn’t, never ever. It takes effort, engagement and a big dose of endurance to be great at any kind of communication.
I’ve listed some of the headlines that most annoy me below. I found them by randomly searching on Google for ‘easy ways’ to boost your social media strategy.
‘7 Easy Ways To Boost Social Engagement Today’
‘5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Social Media Marketing’
‘8 Guaranteed Ways to Increase Social Media Reach’
‘11 Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Social Media Results’
The formula: no effort = great results. This is very rarely true in any context.
I teach large organisations how to manage their social media strategy. Not a single person has ever said it’s easy, quick or simple to manage their strategy. Nope, not a single one and I’ve met hundreds of social media managers.
Here Are My Difficult, Time-Consuming But Dynamic Tips To Boost Your Social Media Strategy
1) Learn about your values and what you stand for. Get your organisation to agree what these values are and what they mean to you as a group. Being a great communicator always starts with knowing yourself.
2) Get to know who your stakeholders are whether they be online, offline, internal, external or previous or future partners. Have a clear picture of who you are trying to communicate with; this will help you and your team to visualize what you are trying to say.
3) Build a rapport with all teams in your organisation so they will want to get involved. A great social media strategy is about having everyone in an organisation take an active role by being present in social media networks, participating in discussions, sharing content and making sure content is reaching the right people.
4) Attract (and keep) some amazing writers and storytellers to your team. Your words and messages matter in social media. Creating online messages that people want to share is not easy. There is plenty of content online and every word you share must be special.
5) Follow the news. Find an interesting twist on relevant news stories and share your opinion about it on your social media channels (great social media managers are the first to do this). In social media we like to follow people/organisations that have an opinion. Pale, vanilla, boring comments never make an impact online. In situations like this it comes in handy to know your values, and which side you are on.
6) Always keep an eye out for new trends. The day you lose sights of what’s happening in the world you will be behind. Also, follow the changes in how your online communities behave. People’s online behaviour is constantly shifting.
7) Ensure your team are great at image creation and photo management so your online images always look impressive. Some team members need to be fluent in Photoshop and similar design programmes.
8) Know the online privacy laws of every country you are present in, and keep everyone in your team updated about them. Build report and trust with the legal team so they feel contented about your online communication.
9) Create social media guidelines that people can, and will read and understand.
10) Become a big data ninja and learn how to interpret the numbers that all our social media networks spit out. Measure only the KPIs that matter so that you are not spending too much time interpreting numbers that won’t help you improve your online activities.
11) Convince leadership and the finance department that they should invest more money and resources in digital strategy next year, the year after and every year after that. Plan to recruit more team members and get leadership to support the idea that reaching out and staying involved in social media is the right way to go.
Conclusion
?The web reflects a complex society that is hard to navigate. In large organisations you have multiple social media accounts in different languages and operating in different time zones. Never trust anyone who says it’s easy to mange your social media strategy, or that a few quick fixes will do it. It isn’t, and quick fixes won’t help.
If you want to stick out in the mega-busy world of the web you need to work on your organisation’s social media skills and inspire other people around your to do the same.
Dig deep and do things that are challenging and time-consuming if you are serious about boosting your social media strategy.
When you are comfortable and don’t feel that working with the web and social media is perplex and confusing you are probably not learning, expanding and reaching as far as you could.
Original Article
Find out more on the future of Content Marketing at our DLUK - Trends briefing on the 24th September 2015