- Are you directing existing and potential clients to your Facebook page or to interact with you on LinkedIn or Twitter? Unless you nofity them, they won’t know you have a social media presence or even where to find it.
- Are you and your Management team fully on-board and abreast with all your social media activity and messages? It’s staggering how many CEO’s have no idea what is being tweeted in their name. It does not reflect well on a company if those that work for or run the company are totally unaware of its social media content.
The key to resolving this issue is to create some continuity between your online and offline marketing including what your employees (at all levels) say as representatives of your company.
So how do you create this continuity?
- Brief all team members regularly on all social media activity and give additional ad-hoc briefings for anything relevant to something topical in the news.
- Get regular feedback from all levels of your team on their knowledge and understanding of your social media activity and messages to make sure both the social media message and briefing was clear.
- Train all your team how to bring your social media presence into their conversations. This should include printing their/the companies social media addresses on all business cards, printed marketing material and advertising. Team members should also be incentivised to ask customers if they are aware of the company’s social media addresses.
- Involve all team members in the company’s social media marketing by encouraging all them to follow the company on twitter, to connect with other company members on LinkedIn, to retweet the company tweets and to tweet themselves about company related matters
- Make sure that all marketing teams/departments talk to each other so that the offline and online marketing activity mirror and support each other.
- When deciding on hashtags or twitter handles trying to choose a name which is short, logical and memorable. This makes is easier for staff to remember and increases the likelihood that they will be used.
Initially all this can be done via a major launch event for staff which will not only highlight the importance of social media to your company’s success but would also give you an opportunity to share with everyone the company’s social media addresses, handles, preferred hastags and discussion topics or stances.
By doing this you not only involve the whole company in everything social media related, you truly connect offline and online, encouraging interaction with those inside and outside the company and additionally, you position your company as a big influencer within the social media arena.
