Are you jealously looking at your competitors, by the looks of it, genius social media campaigns? How did they come up with all those great ideas? It must have taken them rigorous production planning, approval meetings and tightly managed projects? Or maybe not at all.
This is not a blog post about setting goals for social media campaigns, how to measure them and how to accurately attributing value. No, this is a post about how to create great content that inspires, creates a laugh and hopefully adds some value to the conversation, and how to make that happen within your team.
Great content and social media campaigns are seldom accidental, but the plan behind what creates these success stories might surprise you a bit.
Make a plan on how to empower your employees
In your company, can your community manager grab a screenshot of a prospective customers twitter profile, add a little fun, write a text and tweet it back from your company account? Does he have the tools, guidelines and approval to do so? In other words are you employees enough empowered to create great content in social media channels?
An opportunity can pass by within minutes, there’s not always time to write production briefs, seeking approvals, listening to the feedback and concerns of 4 managers, sometimes the best content just got to be done in that right moment.
It’s not a question of stupid liberty or some kind of anarchy, rather the opposite. It’s about providing the correct governing of social media channels, you do that by providing your employees with guidelines, education and trust.
Your action-list
- Govern your employees with social media guidelines, but not the type that lists all the things you cannot do
- Give your staff the adequate training and recruit staff that enjoys customer interaction, it cannot be forced upon
- Every image doesn’t need to have the seal of approval of the art-director, give your community manager the brand manual and some graphics to play with.
- Timing is everything, let go on the approvals but make sure to correct if you mess up
The above is a screen grab from AvalanShare’s Twitter account (full disclosure: I’m co-owner of AvalanShare), a company that builds social sharing campaign tools for websites. The community manager spotted Rebecka, a female follower that maybe should be interested in Frogpearl’s products. This wasn’t something that was written in a content schedule, this was a result of an empowered community manager spotting an opportunity to make awareness of the campaign without coming a cross as a hard seller.
Need help? I can help your company with the above and much more, let me know by e-mail.
