With the world of commerce in the summer slowdown, now is a good time to perform an audit of how your company’s efforts are performing in reaching out to customers and other audiences on social media.
These audits, which a business should do every six months, examine where things are going well in your social media outreach, what you need to do better and what measures are necessary to improve.
A social media strategy assessment has three phases:
1. Giving Objectives the Once-Over
Before launching any outreach, your business must first consider who the audience is you’re reaching out to and what you want that group of people to do. This is the basis for all communications your business will have with the outside world, be that in cyberspace or elsewhere.
For many businesses, social media is an avenue for talking to customers. Connecting with clientele successfully means knowing as much as possible about those people—from their typical ages, geographic locations, and incomes to the social sites they prefer, the times of day they’re typically online, and the devices they use when visiting those sites.
2. Scoping out What’s out There
Search tools such as Social Mention can help your company scour the online landscape to see what’s being said about it. Part of this effort centers on discovering customer opinions about a business. Their comments, while sometimes brutal, can alert executives to corporate problems they might otherwise have never known about.
The other side to this piece of the audit is checking for unauthorized parties who might be pretending to represent the business, along with any potential leaks of corporate trade secrets, such as technical documents or plans for future products.
3. Assessing the Branding Initiative
The company’s marketing group must go over every representation of the company on social media to ensure it is up to date, consistent, and puts the company’s best foot forward.
Concurrently, social media strategy auditors must check whether all posts, profiles and other company representations are in line with best practices for doing outreach in that realm.
If a company isn’t doing so already, now is optimal to put tools to work for collecting and crunching data about the business’ presence on social media.
The social media realm is too big and changes too rapidly for any individual to fully keep tabs on. This is an area where getting outside help can maximize your efforts.
About the Author
Bernard Perrine is the CEO & co-founder of Twitter marketing company SocialCentiv. A founding partner and former corporate officer of Kinko’s, Perrine has also held leadership positions with Eastman Kodak and Microsoft. He can be reached at [email protected].
