intelligex social media conference developing a social media strategy by barbara davies

© Barbara Davies 2012. All Rights Reserved.

• After completing a BA English & Journalism at the University of Johannesburg, I went on to complete a Postgraduate Diploma in Business Management at Wits Business School.

• After graduation I began working as a publicist for a small PR & Marketing firm.

• I have been working in advertising for 6 years and have extensive experience in digital and “new media”.

• I am an avid blogger and contributor to a number of blogs, a social media addict and a communication junkie — people fascinate me and I love nothing more than to watch the way people interact with each other in different situations

Thursday 26 April 12


• A strategy is defined as your plan of action, a policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim.

• Strategy is imperative to the success of any endeavour.

• With the help of a strategist you need to define the who’s, what’s, how’s, where’s, why’s and when’s of your campaign or presence.

• It is of paramount importance that these be relevant to your brand and in line with your overall marketing strategy.

• Social media is merely another mechanism in your marketing 360, another spoke in the wheel of marketing tools.

• Your social media strategy should ultimately strive to achieve the same overall goals as your marketing strategy as a whole.



• Before you can start a social media presence you need to determine which platforms you will embark on and in order to do that, you must first figure out where your audience is.

• Similarly, you can’t determine where your audience is if you don’t first know who you will be talking to.

• This is related to your bulls-eye demographic.

• It’s important to remember that you can’t and shouldn’t try to talk to everyone, you need only engage with relevant stakeholders for your brand and which stakeholders are relevant depends on what you hope to achieve with your social media presence.

• Once you’ve figured out who you’ll be engaging with you can find out where they are.



• For example, if your bulls-eye demographic is predominantly young, tech-savvy and socially aware, you will need to engage on multiple platforms in order to meet their engagement requirements.

• Nike Basketball for example has over 3,9m fans on Facebook, approximately 250,000 followers on twitter and over 57,000 subscribers to their YouTube channel. They have hundreds of pins and repins on Pintrest as well as around 150 followers on the fledgling social network.

• This group is the “instant gratification generation”, they expect near-constant updates and engagement on social media.

• They want you to be talking with them, not just to them, they expect you to behave like one of their buddies.

• As such your social media engagement strategy needs to be that much more in depth in order to keep up with their time and content demands.



• Conversely, if your bulls-eye demographic is more professional, over 55, top LSM groups you will have a much smaller following on social media and people will primarily look to your website for online interaction.

• These groups engage with a specific end-game in mind; they want information, not conversation. When you phone your stock broker you don’t ask him how his kids are or what the weather is like in Sandton, you ask how your share portfolio is handling the news that Anglo has sold is shares in SCAW Metals.

• Alexander Forbes for example has a (comparatively menial) 14,000 fans on Facebook and no official twitter presence. Their CEO, Edward Kieswetter, however has approximately 750 followers.

• For a brand like Alexander Forbes the CEO is the official voice of the brand and his/her online presence has to behave accordingly. He/she shouldn’t be excessively tweeting about his/her weekend activities — a few personal tweets is acceptable, encouraged even as it gives the brand a face, but this shouldn’t be the norm.

• Another example of a very successful CEO presence is that of FNB and Michael Jordaan, it puts a face to the brand and allows people the opportunity to engage on a one-to-one basis with the brand, which is exactly what we want on social media.

• FNB’s other presence, RB Jacobs, is also a very successful presence, one that has given a face to their customer service department and has improved customer satisfaction exponentially. Despite the fact that everyone knows RB Jacobs is not in fact a real person, they engage with the profile as if it were and are therefore experiencing a “one-to-one” conversation dynamic with a group of individuals

• Your strategy will define the direction your brand takes on social media and therefore needs to be throughly and carefully thought out.

• The person who writes your strategy needs to have an intimate knowledge of the brand as a whole, as well as in depth knowledge of the brand ethos and positioning on traditional media.

• I reiterate, your social media strategy must be aligned to your overall brand strategy.



• Now you know where your audience “hangs out” on social media, now you need to listen to what they’re saying.

• Listen to what they’re saying not only about your brand but about your competitors, your suppliers, each other and themselves.

• If you are ultimately able to engage with them on a personal level because of the insights you gained from listening to their conversations you will set your brand apart. These human insights you can gain will be invaluable in your future engagements with your audience.

• Conversations start with listening. Listening is imperative to the success of your social media presence.

• Listen to your competitors, this will help you determine what works and what doesn’t.

• Listen to the types of messages your competitors are putting to their audience, listen to the way the messages are delivered — is the tone of voice friendly and casual or more professional and formal?

• Then listen to the responses your competitors are getting from their audience — are the responses positive or negative? Did the audience enjoy that type of engagement?

• If the audience’s response is not favourable then your engagement strategy needs to follow a different tack. This will help to set your brand apart from it’s competitors, it allows you to learn from their mistakes.



• You are probably wondering how you are supposed to listen to these engagements.

• Obviously those engagements that occur on open platforms, such as your competitors’ Facebook pages are easy to listen to but engagements about your brand happen every day on social media and you might find it difficult to know where to go to listen for them.

• The answer is online reputation management, and it’s worth it’s weight in gold.

• There are numerous ORM tools available, one of the best is BrandsEye, you can list custom search-phrases relevant to your brand. It will then report back to you, in real-time, what people are saying about your brand across a wide variety of platforms.


http://www.brandseye.com

http://www.brandseye.com


• Another way to listen to the conversation is to seek out “influentials”, these are people who drive or initiate conversation, people who have a degree of authority and whose opinions are respected on certain matters.

• If an influential recommends a product or service people are more likely to try it out.

• People respect what their peers say about a brand far more than they respect what a brand says about itself.

• Love him or hate him, a local example of an influential is Gareth Cliff.



• Gareth Cliff has over 300,000 fans on Facebook and is considered to be an “authority” on a number of things.

• Gareth saw the monetary value in being considered an influential and in early-2011 his social media rate card was featured in numerous industry blog posts.

• According to his rate card, a tweet featuring your brand would run you R20,000.


http://www.techcentral.co.za/wp-content/.../06/social-media-rate-card.pdf

http://www.techcentral.co.za/wp-content/.../06/social-media-rate-card.pdf


• Similarly a tweet about your brand would cost you R15,000. When you consider a tweet is a maximum of 140 characters, that means you would be paying almost R110 a character.

• But with over 250,000 followers on twitter and thousands listening to him each day on his radio station, Gareth Cliff has a fairly extensive audience, that hangs on his every word.

• The publication of Gareth’s rate card didn’t do anything for the credibility of influentials because people started questioning, “is that really your opinion or is it paid adspace?”

• Recently Facebook and twitter have updated their terms of service effectively outlawing the practice of selling your posts to the highest bidder and as such the credibility of influentials is slowly returning.



• Finding the influentials you should be listening to for most brands will be easy; think of your industry and off the the top of your head you can probably come up with at least 10 people you would consider influentials in your industry.

• If you were in the financial industry for example, Bruce Whitfield would be an influential, similarly for the advertising industry Andy Rice and Jeremy Maggs are influentials we listen to.

• Influentials are very often industry journalists, bloggers or writers.

• If you’re still struggling to figure out who you should be listening to a very helpful tool is WeFollow.com.

• WeFollow is tailored to twitter but generally speaking people who are influential on twitter have a blog, Facebook page, Google+ page, etc.

• WeFollow takes influentials and splits them by category or industry and lists them in descending order by number of followers.

• You can search by country, by city, by industry, etc.


http://www.wefollow.com/

http://www.wefollow.com/


• It is critically important that you clearly define your goals before you embark on a social media presence.

• To use an analogy, if your social media endeavour is a roadtrip, then your goals are your destination.

• Just like with a roadtrip your destination will determine your route and the vehicles you choose to get there.

• Your social media strategy is your route map; how you intent to get from where you are to where you want to be.



• Defining your destination may seem like a daunting task and if you look at it in isolation is will be.

• Marketing must be viewed holistically, your social media presence is merely another marketing tool in your arsenal.

• As such, your social media goals need to be aligned to your brand strategy objectives.

• Consider your brand strategy objectives, think about whether social media can help you to achieve any of those objectives.

• Remember to be realistic, social media is a tool, another spoke, not the be all and end all of your marketing strategy.

• Your goals should be SMART:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Attainable

• Realistic

• Timely

• It’s very important that you consider — like you would with any goals — short-, medium- and long-term goals and assign the appropriate timeframe to your goals.

• Even on social media, not everything happens overnight; it will still take you months of hard work to gain a following that you consider to be worthwhile.

• You wont’ sign up one day and have 100,000 fans the next.



• Make sure that your destination is at least close to where your audience wants to go. If you’re not going somewhere that’s of interest to them, they won’t come along for the ride.

• This basically boils down to the fact that your social media presence has to add value to their experience of your brand.

• You can add value in a number of ways, with exclusive special offers or rewards, sneak peeks, value add coupons or something as simple as an express conduit for complaints or customer service issues.

• You have to give your social media audience something extra to ensure they come along for the journey.



• Now you know who you’re talking to, you know where those people hang out, you’ve decided where you’re going and now it’s time to figure out how you’re going to get there.

• Remember, you don’t have to do everything at once.

• You may decide that ultimately you would like to be on several platforms but first you want to test the water.

• There is absolutely nothing wrong with this strategy, a phased rollout may be the best thing for your brand.

• Start with the platforms that are going to be most beneficial to you and to your audience.

• Remember it’s better to build an engaged audience than a big audience — it’s better to have 10 fans who are talking about your brand and engaging positively than 100 fans who aren’t saying anything about your brand.

• Because of the sheer volume of Facebook users (which this week reached 901m users) and the functionality the pages allow, this will often be the first platform in a phased rollout. In fact, especially for small brands, a Facebook page can (and often does) replace a website.



• There are hundreds of social media platforms to choose from and the number grows almost daily.

• Not all of them are relevant to your brand or to your message.

• It’s also important to remember that not every message is suitable to each platform, it’s vital that you tailor your messages to the specific platform on which you plan to engage.

• Don’t think you have to be on every platform, this is a myth — you have to be on every platform that is relevant to your brand but not necessarily on every platform.

• Start with the ones that will give you the best ROI; both for you and your audience.



• Now you know who you’re talking to, you know where those people hang out, you’ve decided where you’re going and how you’re going to get there, now it’s time to figure what you’re going to say along the way.

• First of all, determine your voice on each platform and remember that not every message is suited to every platform so your voice on one platform may be vastly different from your voice on the next platform.

• Some messages work on Facebook, for example, but won’t work on twitter and visa versa.

• It’s important to determine what each platform will be used for and plan the content accordingly.

• Develop a content theme for each month (or week or promotion period, depending on your brand and industry).

• These content themes can largely be drawn from your annual marketing plan.

• Your content themes may or may not be the same across platforms.

• Determining a content theme will help you to identify events, etc. you can capitalise on — promos to run, product launches, etc.

• All of these things affect the content you will be putting out across platforms.

• Developing content themes is a similar process to developing a media plan, in fact your traditional media plan will serve as a good point of departure.



• Here is an example of what a content theme plan may look like.



• Once you have developed your content themes you are now ready to develop your content plans.

• To continue the journey analogy, your goals are your destination, the platforms are your vehicles, your audience represents your traveling companions, your content themes are the national road maps you use to plan your journey. That means that your content plans are the individual town and city maps that show the exact route you will take on your journey.

• By properly planning your route to take you through key areas you will hopefully pick up more traveling companions along the way.

• New traveling companions may affect your route slightly; you may take a specific detour to accommodate a certain group of traveling companions.

• The beauty of social media is that it’s easy enough to accommodate the wants of new groups.

• But remember, if you do it too often or too drastically you may alienate existing members of your audience.

• By changing your route may also inadvertently change your destination, which means you may undermine your strategy and therefore your ability to achieve your goals.



• One of the most important things to remember about content is that it is on behalf of the brand, it is not your personal opinion.

• Your brand’s page is not the place to air your personal political views, it’s not the place to discuss your favourite colour or fashion trend (unless you’re writing for a political page or fashion house).

• You should steer clear of mentioning the weather because not all of your audience members will be experiencing the same thing you are. If you’re writing, for example, for the City of Cape Town, you are free to discuss the weather in Cape Town because your presence is unashamedly from Cape Town.

• Stay away from person opinions and singular pronouns, such as I, me, my, etc. rather use nondescript we, our descriptions.

• Don’t make the mistake of writing for yourself or your peers, always make sure you are writing on behalf of the brand.

• The person responsible for creation of content must be extremely comfortable with the brand ethos and personality, this person must be able to write on behalf of the brand.

• Make sure the person knows if your brand is fun-loving and happy go lucky or a serious and conservative brand.

• This must be defined upfront, before anything is written for the presence.



• There are a number of different content structures that will help you to constantly be coming up with fresh content. One that a number of people advocate is 1/3 split.

• This means 1/3 of your content will be specific to the content theme of the period, 1/3 will be general content about your brand and 1/3 will be general industry content.

• By including general industry content you are able to show your audience that it’s not all about you, that you’re interested in more than just selling a product, that in fact you’re interested in having a conversation.

• It shows you as a thought-leader, a conversation-started and and opinion-shaper in your industry.

• Following a predefined recipe will help you to constantly come up with new, relevant content.



• Your content plan will include the exact wording of your posts, it will include links and photographs if relevant.

• You will need a content plan per platform and remember not to blanket broadcast content across platforms, as mentioned previously not every message is relevant or appropriate to every platform.

• Your audience on different platforms may be vastly different so you’ll need to ensure that the content you’re posting on each platform is relevant to that specific audience (this will be mostly trial and error).



• All too often, companies make the mistake of not committing the necessary resources to their social media presence; they assign the job to a junior member of the team or an intern and often this person lacks the necessary maturity and brand-investment to handle the responsibility.

• Someone (or in the case of larger organisations, a group of someones) has to take responsibility for and ownership of the ultimate success (or failure) of the endeavour.

• If you’re not able or willing to commit the necessary resources, then it’s best not to engage on social media. In some cases, social media abstinence is the best strategy.

• Some brands choose to fully outsource their social media management, others keep it fully in-house and others use a hybrid model.



• If you decide to keep it in-house, you may need to assign more than one person to the task, not only because of the volume of work that may be required but also because of the type of work.

• One person may be fully adept at maintaining and managing a Facebook page but may not have the necessary skills required to keep a blog up to date with relevant, well-written content.

• You may also need to assign a team if there are multiple departments involved in your social media presence; you may need a member from HR, one from sales and marketing, one from customer service, etc.



• If you decide to fully outsource your social media management, you need to ensure you have found the right fit because, ultimately, you are entrusting the “voice” of your brand to an outsider. As such you need to ensure that the person preparing the content fully understands the voice.

• Most social media management companies will present content themes for approval but final content plans are then at the management company’s discretion.

• This is not necessarily a problem, provided you have the right fit.

• All of the above holds true whether you’re outsourcing to a social media management company or hiring a new employee to handle the management in-house.



• Personally, I advocate the use of a hybrid model, one in which a social media management company or consultant and the in-house team meet somewhere in the middle.

• Content themes and plans are drawn up together and implementation thereof is left to the management company or consultant.

• It is imperative that the management company or consultant has access to the right people so that should any queries need to be escalated, they are escalated to the appropriate people.

• If the management company or consultant does not have access to the right people there will be an unwanted and unnecessary delay in response time, which will result in a less than satisfying experience for your audience.



• Now you have everything in place; you have determined who your audience is, which platforms they are engaging on, what you hope to achieve with this venture and what your content strategy will be going forward, now all that remains is to “push the button.”



• Remember to stick to your schedule and be consistent.

• Check your presences daily to ensure there are no comments or queries that require responses.

• Monitor and manage interactions and engagements on a daily basis.

• Social media is about conversation generation and – provided you’re doing it right – your posts should generate conversation. If you aren’t monitoring your presences daily, you are effectively walking out on your audience mid-conversation.

• Scheduling tools can help to ensure you stick to your content plan. There are a number of such tools available.



• One of which is HootSuite. HootSuite is great because provided you capture your content plan in the right format you can simply upload your .csv or Excel spreadsheet and viola, your content is scheduled. You can download a template from their website.

• Scheduling posts does not mean that you can now forget about your presence, you still need to monitor the engagements daily or you’ll miss out on vital parts of the conversation.

• The free version of HootSuite allows you to add up to 5 networks and HootSuite supports Facebook, twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, MySpace, PingFM and WordPress.

• HootSuite is designed around feeds — newsfeeds, @mention feeds, message feeds, etc and feeds are displayed on tabs, which means you can have a consolidated view of your presences in one place.

• This means that HootSuite is ideal for actively managed accounts and multiple account managers (across brands or across platforms).

• HootSuite also allows you to get information about fans and followers because it can provide links to their social presences as well as display their Klout scores.

• HootSuite also allows you to create lists of users you would like to keep a closer eye on, which means that disgruntled customers can be dealt with quickly providing a better social engagement for all.

• HootSuite works on a subscription basis and subscriptions range from free to $2000 per month.


http://www.hootsuite.com/

http://www.hootsuite.com/


• TweetDeck is, as the name implies, more geared towards twitter but it also supports Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and MySpace.

• Like HootSuite content is arranged in feeds.

• For me, TweekDeck’s best feature is its keyword search feature, this allows you to track particular search phrases or keywords in real-time, which makes it a brilliant entry-level ORM tool.



• When we are thinking about traditional media, the first thing we do is think about “how are we going to measure this?” We ask, “what are the readership/listenership/viewership figures of that magazine/radio/tv show?” We always want to know what our ROI will be, and why should social media be any different?

• Right in the beginning you decided what your objectives and goals were for your presence, keeping those objectives in mind you will need to determine your metrics for success.

• You need to constantly review everything, ask if the platforms you’re on are still the right platforms to be on, ask if your objectives are still relevant, is your management strategy still the right one (outsource vs. in-house/hybrid), ask if your audience is providing the engagement you had hoped for, is it the audience you’d hoped for and whether or not you’re keeping that audience happy.

• There are numerous different metrics for success you can apply and the ones you choose will be determined by your strategy and the objectives you hoped to achieve.

• If, for example, you wanted an online purchasing portal your metrics for success would include the number of sales you made via your portal. If you only wanted to raise brand awareness, your metrics for success would include the number of fans or followers you have gained.

• ROI measurement for social media is not an exact science, nothing in social media is. A lot of your measurements will be based on gut-feel and informed guesswork.



• Just like any strategy you need to be constantly reviewing it and if necessary revising it.

• You may need to tweak your metrics for success based on a slight change to your objectives, for example. Or you may find that your original plan is the exact opposite of what your audience hoped for from your brand and you need to virtually start again.

• The beauty of digital media is that you can do just that, you can easily adjust, adapt or about-turn your social media strategy virtually overnight, it is a constant evolution based on what’s happening on your presences.

• Remember to set out your internal and public-facing policies.

• Internal policies will include what your employees can and can’t say about the brand on their personal profiles as well as what they say on the brand’s profile or on behalf of the brand.

• External, or public-facing, policies will set out what is and isn’t permissible from your audience on your profile (e.g. profanity, hate speech, discrimination, etc.)



• To sum it all up, you need to find your audience and listen to what they’re saying (about everything) and find out where they’re saying it.

• Determine your goals and objectives, make sure they’re realistic and attainable.

• Figure out which platforms you want to be on and what your rollout strategy is.

• Determine your voice for each platform and begin formalising your content for each platform, ensure that content is relevant to the platform, structured according to the voice for that platform and in line with the what the audience on that platform expects.

• Engage with your audience, take negativity offline wherever possible and try to keep the conversation light.

• Have a look at how you’re doing, is it successful so far?

• Once you’ve done all that, go back and start again by listening to how your audience is reacting to your conversation and see if you need to tweak or adjust anything.



• Remember, that whether or not you engage on social media your brand is being spoken about out there on the world wide web.

• There are customers — both satisfied and dissatisfied — there are suppliers and competitors all talking and all engaging, with each other and with your brand.

• If you’re not engaging in the conversation you are potentially missing a huge opportunity.

• If you have determined that social media engagement is not in fact right for your brand, you need — at very least — to be listening to the conversation that is being had.


intelligex social media conference developing a social media strategy by barbara davies

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