They Say Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail

Analyzing performance, competitive research, and planning are indeed crucial to get the best ROI from social media. But if you consequently fail to execute your plan, the hours you had put into creating it will have been wasted, since you won’t have hit your objectives. For that reason, you need to plan both what you will publish and how you will do it - both your content and your content execution.

This is especially important if you operate in a complex environment: lots of social media profiles to manage, hundreds or thousands of content pieces, a high volume of user questions, teams in different regions, agency involvement, etc. Lots can go wrong - but it doesn’t have to.

In this study we outline several best practices to follow when executing an enterprise-wide social media management plan, and the common pitfalls you have to watch out for.

Security and Approvals

We have all seen social media blunders and mistakes from even the best brands. One wrong link, a tired or disgruntled employee, and your company is the laughing stock of the internet.

A social media crisis handled in the wrong way can impact the bottom line, while a well-handled one can create good publicity for the brand. But no matter where on the spectrum the situation falls, it will still be time-consuming and a drain of resources for your teams to handle it. In fact, it’s easier to plan ahead and employ measures to make sure it doesn’t happen in the first place.

We advise companies to employ strong user rights management in their social media management or publishing tools and an approvals process.

That way, users have access to publicly interact with content only on the pages that they are managing, and all content gets a two-step verification process that helps ensure costly blunders don’t happen.

Oversight and Staying on Brand

Your brands will mean different things in different regions and markets. However, you should maintain strong central branding as a guide to regional integration. Diffused social media management, while essential for localization and regional adaptation, carries with it the risk of diluting core branding.

A digital director or CMO should have the ability to oversee all the content that is put out around their brands to ensure everything posted stays on-brand, to pick up on what the competition posts, to check whether your social customer care teams are handling the inflow of questions, and to see what social media users are saying about your and competitor brands.

Oversight of what is happening on social in every region and market will give you the most complete picture of what is happening with your brand overall.

[Download PDF to see Table]

Improving Collaboration

As we move towards social media management across regions and departments, the need for teams to communicate on what goes out under the brand’s name grows. This is especially important for those organizations that employ social media not only for marketing but also for social customer care, PR, recruitment, or more, as all of these departments have to stay on the same page about what is being communicated to the public. The same applies to agencies.

Your teams will be more productive and they will create better results if they can communicate between themselves in an efficient way. You can maybe handle collaborating on content through email in a small company. In a global organization, planning, creating, and scheduling content without a standardized process is a drain on time and resources.

Don’t get stuck in long and cumbersome email threads about one subject. Pick a social media management tool that allows you to interact freely within the platform and seamlessly collaborate on content creation.

Streamlined communication saves time, and collaborating on content among teams leads to creating better content, which leads to increased engagement, better reach, brand recognition and loyalty - which all affect the bottom line.

Optimizing Delivery

Getting the message out is one of the key tasks for your teams in the current content-heavy, pay-to-play social media landscape. If your messaging is on point but is delivered to the wrong audience, at the wrong time, or its reach isn’t optimized, you’re leaving money on the table.

To be truly optimized, you need to schedule your content, and have calendars for every region and globally that give you a clear picture of what’s been done and what is planned. Have your teams plan and schedule their content in advance and log it into a calendar (or use a tool that will do that automatically). They’ll have more time to source great content, track performance and boost the best posts based on it in the future.

Planning, scheduling, and targeting content, as well as smart social media spending to optimize reach, are the best ways to get the right message delivered to the right people, again and again.

There also need to be guidelines on optimizing spend, boosting the right posts, knowing what the competition is promoting, and which posts get enough organic engagement to justify being boosted.

We’ve built Socialbakers Builder to integrate the complex enterprise social media environments and streamline social media management. In an environment where you need to stay on top of a large volume of content and user questions, mistakes are too easy to make - and all the more costly. While that’s not always a death-sentence for a brand, each little slip-up, like sending a post at the wrong time or to the wrong audience, or failing to boost a post that is doing well organically, or taking too much time to answer a client posting to one of your pages, does in the end lead to loss of ROI.

To combat this, we’ve created a tool that helps you optimize your social media management, publishing, monitoring and listening in one easy-to-navigate interface, and manage users to protect your brand and avoid overloading your employees. You can select the amount of users you would like the system to have, the amount of pages you will be posting to, the listening mentions limit, and so on - and your total cost will correspond to your choices. All of our clients are also taken care of by dedicated account managers that help to continue tailoring your account to your needs, so you can continue evolving in terms of your social media performance.

Take-aways

Employ strong user rights management and an approvals process in social media management or publishing tools.

Oversight of what is happening on social in every region and market is what will give the fullest understanding of what is happening with your brand overall.

Streamlined communication saves time and seamless internal collaboration creates better content, which lead to better engagement, better reach, better brand recognition and loyalty, which all affect the bottom line.

Planning, scheduling and targeting content as well as smart social media spending to optimize reach is the best way to get the right message delivered to the right people, again and again.