Managing a sound social media campaign can be complex. You are managing multiple platforms with various features and benefits including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and now Google+ Project. But, there are two things that can help and that we recommend as an Internet marketing firm. The first is process development and quality control. The second is automation.
In business school, you are taught about the key areas of business including finance, marketing, operations, human resources, and strategy. Many of these core areas of business play a vital role in social media. Let’s take a look at operations and the role that proper process and quality control plays in social media.
Process and Quality Control
The majority of social networking campaigns that fail, do so because there was no clear process in place to maintain the various social networks. While the success of social media does heavily depend on having a value creating conversation with prospects, it also depends on strong process and quality control.
Here are three tips from a process perspective to help you maintain a sustainable and effective social media campaign:
1. Have a weekly or bi-weekly meeting with your social media team to ensure that everyone is aligned on what needs to be communicated in the future, what’s been communicated about your brand and products, and plan future communication.
2. Develop a media plan and calendar that the entire social media team has access to so that the team is aligned on what and when content needs to be sent to your various social media channels.
3. Establish quality control processes for each social network. For example, if you have a blog and you have to sign off on comments before they go live, ensure that a team member is assigned to review comments at specific intervals and forward them to you for approval.
Automation
The majority of business people do not have the time to send out their social media communication manually. It simply takes too much time. To save you and your social media team time, automate certain steps in your social media campaign such as the deployment of weekly value creating social media posts. There are various, low-cost, automation systems that can be used that are easy to use such as Hootsuite. If you have any questions regarding what steps within your social media campaign you should or should not automate, please feel free to share them with us. We’d be happy to help!