Ideas and Instruments You Ought to Know
The world now has 4.33 billion active social media users, up 13.7% last year alone. And almost three quarters of these users (73.5%) either follow brands’ social channels or research brands and products on social media.
Social media has become an important marketing and communication tool for companies of all sizes. A lot can be at stake on corporate social media. (How can the number of stakeholders.)
Here are some important tips and resources for effective social media management for companies.
Bonus: Get a free, customizable competitive analysis template to easily assess the competition and identify opportunities for your brand to move forward.
1. Understand the business priorities
In large corporations, day-to-day social media management can be a long way from meeting room conversations.
To use social media effectively, you need a solid social media strategy. And in order to develop a solid social strategy, you need to understand what is most important to the success of the company right now.
What are the current business priorities? What problems is the company trying to solve right now? If you already know the answers to these questions, you can develop SMART goals to guide your social endeavors.
If you don’t know the answers, ask. A short 15 minute meeting between the head of social marketing and the GMO is an effective way to set priorities.
2. Track the metrics that really matter
Within the social team, it’s okay to enjoy victories associated with vanity metrics like likes and comments.
However, stakeholders higher up in the organization need to see real business results. Otherwise, they will find it difficult to fully engage with your social strategy.
When reporting your results, focus on actual progress towards the goals and business priorities you set in the last tip. Even better if you can frame your results in real dollars and cents. Demonstrate the ROI of your social endeavors or show how social networks fill your sales funnel or drive purchase intent.
3. Create a compliance plan
Companies in regulated industries are very familiar with managing compliance requirements. However, all businesses need to understand how advertising and consumer protection regulations affect social media use.
Compliance risks exist but can be managed as long as you have a plan and use the right tools to protect your brand.
We have a whole blog post on how to stay compliant on social media, but here are some key things to keep in mind:
4. Be ready to face a crisis
Most large companies face a crisis at some point. (100% of all companies have had a crisis for over a year.)
As we explain in our post on Using Social Media for Crisis Communication, your social channels are the fastest way to get information out there. The real-time nature of the social offers the flexibility to adapt quickly to changing conditions. But only if you have an appropriate plan and guidelines in place.
Social is also an easy channel for customers to interact directly with your team. Have a plan so teams know how to respond and when to escalate.
You may also have to deal with a PR crisis specific to your brand. A crisis communication plan ensures that you use social channels to improve the situation, not to make it worse.
Managing corporate social media campaigns is multi-faceted. There are different teams involved in your company. You need the right tools to standardize processes, protect your brand and save time for employees.
Here are six of the best corporate social media solutions to maximize social benefits for large businesses.
1. Marketing automation: Adobe Marketo Engage
Many enterprise marketers are already using Adobe Marketo Engage for marketing automation. Social data integration takes Marketo to the next level.
Source: Marketo
The Marketo Enterprise Integration app for Hootsuite allows you to add social channels to your lead scoring platforms. Then you can target leads with the right messages for their position on the customer journey.
You can also view lead details directly on a Hootsuite stream. This makes it easy to bring moving leads to your sales funnel by adding details about their social activities.
2. CRM: Foreclosure
Only 10% of companies are effectively connecting social data to corporate CRM systems. However, this connection is a crucial way to turn social fans into real business contacts.
Source: Hootsuite App Directory
Salesforce is integrated into social marketing and extends customer relationship management to social channels. It’s a great resource to use to support social selling.
You can identify new sales leads and opportunities that you discover on social networks and capture them in the CRM that you already rely on.
The Salesforce Enterprise Integration app for Hootsuite provides details and activity history for Salesforce leads and contacts. You can add important social activities and conversations to your records. You can also manage details of Salesforce customer cases right from the Hootsuite dashboard.
3. Security: ZeroFOX
As you have already seen, social media offers companies extensive advantages at the corporate level. But we were also honest that implementing a social media strategy for companies is not without risks.
Source: Hootsuite App Directory
ZeroFOX helps to minimize these risks. It offers automated protection against digital threats such as:
- Phishing
- Account transfer
- Brand imitations
- dangerous or offensive content
- malicious links
The ZeroFOX for Hootsuite app provides automated Hootsuite dashboard notifications when your social accounts are targeted. You can then take action by requesting shutdowns or sending the notifications to the right parties in one place.
4. Compliance: Smarsh
Compliance and security are major challenges when implementing a corporate social media strategy.
Smarsh uses an approval workflow to automatically check for compliance and security issues. All content is archived and can be checked in real time.
All of your social posts can also be held legally. They can be added to cases or exported in case they are needed for internal investigations or discoveries.
5. Cooperation: Relaxed
Slack has quickly become popular business collaboration software. As more people work from home, it becomes an increasingly important resource helping teams get things done.
The Slack Pro app for Hootsuite enables teams to collaborate on marketing social media companies. Employees can send social media posts directly to a specific Slack channel, user, or group right from the Hootsuite dashboard. This makes it easy to keep everyone in the loop.
Source: Hootsuite App Directory
You can use the Slack integration to capture relevant social information for each message. You can also assign a feeling to each post and add a comment.
6. Social media management: Hootsuite
There’s a reason employees in more than 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies use Hootsuite.
Hootsuite is an essential social tool for businesses of all sizes. It enables teams to manage multiple corporate social media platforms from one dashboard.
The integrated tools for teamwork and approval optimize task management, project management and employee collaboration.
For corporate customers, Hootsuite has special advanced features. These will help you integrate other business centers into your social tools.
Employee advocacy: Hootsuite Amplify
Amplify is an intuitive app that makes sharing employee content easy and secure. Your employees can use it to share approved social content with their own friends and followers on the fly.
As part of a complete employee advocacy solution, Amplify also helps drive employee engagement. Your employees can easily stay connected and be informed about what is going on in your company.
Analytics: Hootsuite Impact
Hootsuite Impact provides corporate-level customers with advanced social analytics. You can follow organic and paid campaigns side by side. With this data, you can measure and analyze your social marketing efforts while improving ROI.
Source: Hootsuite
With built-in visual tools like graphs and charts, you can create custom reports for different stakeholder groups. Everyone gets exactly the information they need in an easy-to-understand way.
Hootsuite Impact also offers recommendations for optimizing your social strategy.
Research: Hootsuite Insights Powered by Brandwatch
Hootsuite Insights is a social research tool based on social listening. With it, your teams can instantly analyze millions of social posts and conversations. You can find out what people are saying about you (and your competitors) online.
Integrated sentiment analysis tools also show you how people feel when they talk about your brand or products on social channels. After all, measuring social impact is about more than just volume.
Digital advertising: Hootsuite ads
With Hootsuite Ads, your teams can manage social and search campaigns from a dashboard. It also adjusts your campaigns based on performance triggers. It’s an automated way to convert more customers without spending more money.
Customer service: Sparkcentral from Hootsuite
Social media is no longer an optional channel for customer service.
Sparkcentral integrates customer inquiries and interactions through:
- SMS
- Social media channels
- Live chat and chatbots
- Live agent interactions
When a customer sends inquiries across all of your social channels, you can provide a single, clear answer.
You can also use Sparkcentral to create customer service bots. These handle basic customer questions and reduce the time it takes your agents to answer frequently asked questions.
These tips and tools can help you save time and do more – from collaborating smarter to being more secure – right from your Hootsuite dashboard. Bring the power of social media to the tools that already support your business.
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