More businesses are using social media websites like Twitter and Facebook to promote their brand, drive sales, bring people to their organization and to interact with their customers. While Part I of this series provided an overview of social media, Part II deals with the importance of developing a social media strategy. While a business can set up a Twitter account in five minutes, it’s vital to have a detailed plan is in place before launching a site.
Here are seven steps to take before launching a social media website.
1, SET SPECIFIC GOALS: Lay out exactly what you want to accomplish through your social media vehicle(s). Examples of goals include providing another avenue of communication with customers in order to increase retention and customer satisfaction, building trust for your brand name, and driving sales by informing targeted audiences about the latest company news and newest products and offerings.
2, IDENTIFY CONTENT CONTRIBUTORS: Establish a small team of employees who will be primarily responsible for maintaining and updating the social media website and responding to customers’ posts. It’s important to create a training program for your team as well.
3, ESTABLISH A CLEAR COMMUNICATION POLICY: Instruct your social media team on how you want them to communicate online with customers. For example, suggest to them to use less marketing speak and more of a business conversational tone. Remind them to keep interactions brief and that they are building relationships with customers in a special way, and that hitting the enter button to complete a response is like shaking a person’s hand in a face-to-face interaction.
As part of your communication policy, it’s a good idea to schedule when promotion and marketing messages will be released.
4, WRITE A CRISIS PLAN: Most companies aren’t prepared to handle the conversations and feedback from customers that social media websites create. They aren’t prepared if somebody says something negative about them. Don’t make that mistake. Write a crisis plan that explains how your company will handle negative comments, and be prepared to respond to negative comments quickly. An hour in social media time is like two days in traditional media time.
5, TRACK SUCCESS: Identify how you will track the success of your social media campaign. You can do this by monitoring what people are saying about your brand online, and by figuring out what sales can be attributed to social media interaction.
6, FOLLOW THE COMPETITION: Plan to follow what people are saying about your competitors, and how your competitors are using their social media websites.
7, DECIDE WHICH SOCIAL MEDIA WEBSITE(S) YOU WANT TO JOIN: After you have developed a detailed strategy, you will be able to figure out what social media vehicle(s) is best for your company.
After much thought and detailed strategic planning, Frontier has entered the social media scene by launching a Twitter site, www.twitter.com/FrontierCorp.
If you have a question about your service, or a technology question in general, just direct message us through Twitter, and one of our representatives will provide the answers you need in a timely fashion. Frontier will also use Twitter to provide our latest news and newest information about our products and offerings. It’s also a nice way for us to find out what people are saying about Frontier. We will be able to contact them and supply help in any way the we can.
This is just the beginning of the social media age. There is intense competition that I think will result in even more social media sites, and more ways to interact in real time using advanced technology applications.
If you have any technology questions, feel free to contact Lynne Petersen from Frontier Communications at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or log on to www.frontieronline.com.
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