Social Media Strategic Communication is an essential guide that provides up-to-date strategies, lessons, and expert perspectives on effective approaches-all in one book!
In the quickly growing and ever changing world of social media, it can seem daunting to maintain a current perspective on trends, etiquette and best practices. However, this need not be the case. This course will help you accomplish more as a communicator by helping you understand how to leverage tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn to create positive, professional communication for your company or organization.
The rise of social media has had significant effects on the strategic communication industry. Marketers use social media to enhance traditional efforts such as direct mail fliers and television advertisements. Social media also enable marketers to create interactive content for audiences. In the public relations field, social media give professionals easier access to journalists and news media outlets. For example, it is becoming common for public relations professionals to reach out to reporters via Twitter.
In many ways, social media have made it easier for consumers to hold organizations, public figures, and large institutions accountable (Green, 2012). Users can easily find and reveal information about a previous event involving an organization, whether it was advantageous or damaging to the brand. Users can also provide instant public feedback by voicing their opinions via social media networks. Furthermore, social media have made it challenging for many organizations to control their brand and present a consistent message across platforms. Audiences can generate information that can be damaging to a brand’s reputation. Take a look at this video from Sherry Lloyd, social media and marketing manager for Vineyard Columbus, who discusses brand management and the challenges of controlling a company’s identity in the social media age.
Listening and Learning
Ninety-three percent of marketers use social media for business. Customer service, product support, research and other departments also use it to listen to not only consumers but also influencers, shareholders and the general public.
Social listening is the process of tracking dialogues to uncover communication opportunities. Objectives may include identifying influencers, tracking a marketing campaign, finding customer service opportunities, monitoring the workplace, tracking investor sentiment, and watching reactions to a news event. Organizations obtain profound knowledge every day, simply by listening to conversations around specific hashtags or keywords. All of this happens before the conversation between a company and its customers even begins.
Here are a few ways organizations listen and learn:
Identifying Influencers: A hashtag search turns up a celebrity tweeter who mentioned her purchase of your stylish new jacket. A widely read movie critic just panned your latest flick in a scathing review linked from Facebook. A gadget guru just posted a review of your new drone on his YouTube channel.
Tracking a Marketing Campaign: Your company started a new catch phrase, and it is being tweeted and retweeted after your Super Bowl ad. A nonprofit starts a viral video campaign to raise awareness for curing a disease and thousands have posted YouTube videos of themselves participating.
Finding Customer Service Opportunities: A search for “billing problems” along with your company’s name turns up hundreds of angry Facebook posts and tweets about perceived dishonesty. A search on your product’s instructions turns up more than 1,000 people who can’t get past assembly step four.
Monitoring the Workplace: A former employee just posted a negative review on Glassdoor, which is met with wide agreement. A group is praising your workplace culture on Facebook and those posts are getting likes.
Tracking Investor Sentiment: Market movers like Warren Buffet influence price action on a company’s stock with the most mildly worded positive or negative statement. An inexplicable stock price drop is met with waves of consumer speculation and misinformation that must be addressed.
Watching Public Reactions to a News Event: Your oil spill is wrongly blamed on negligent equipment maintenance. The government wants you to unlock encrypted data on personal phones to intercept terrorist plots. Your pilot is a hero today for diving a plane into the Hudson River after birds destroy both engines, saving all 155 lives on board. But tomorrow, he will be vilified, only to be exonerated again the next day in the court of public opinion.
Responding and Engaging
Before companies can effectively engage with consumers, they must identify key communities and where they like to interact and get information online. Beyond Facebook and YouTube, influential dialogues occur on lesser known platforms such as podcasts, blogs and forums as well as in applications.
Once an organization identifies the channels, it must create strategic messaging for all of the company’s objectives. This messaging must be authentic, focused and consistent across all social platforms, so that no matter who communicates, the brand gains equity in specific values.
Timeliness of response is also critical; 43 percent of social media users interact with brands for a direct response to a problem or question and 75 percent expect a response in one hour or less. Seven in eight messages go unanswered within 72 hours, so most companies are falling far short of expectations. This is not simply for lack of manpower, but a lack of content resources to help provide immediate responses to commonly asked questions and a lack of training with these resources.
Transparency is essential, yet many organizations overlook the need for truth. Revealing as much information as possible, as soon as possible, establishes trust in crisis situations.
Continued access to help and expertise is another imperative. Thirty-one percent of users who interact with brands seek direct access to customer service representatives or product experts who can enhance their experience over a longer term. Organizations must therefore put people in place — in every function from customer service to engineering — who can serve as ongoing liaisons in this manner.
If you are thinking about pursuing a social media degree, it is important to know how social media fits into strategic communications. Strategic communications, within a corporate communications strategy, are determined by an organization’s objectives. If a business needs to create brand awareness or increase sales, for example, a social media manager develops strategies to fulfill those goals.
An organization can achieve brand awareness with a strategic campaign that establishes a presence on every social media platform. Companies can create plans to increase sales by establishing metrics to monitor how often visitors go to a company’s web site and if they purchase one of its products while there. Social media managers can establish these metrics, monitor the data, and work with sales and marketing teams to optimize the conversion rate.
As these examples of strategic communications strategy show, social media managers are engaged with developing content and establishing metrics to measure the return on investment (ROI). ROI allows a company to make strategic decisions about spending in particular categories.
Although 93 percent of businesses use social media, only 12 percent feel that they use it for maximum effectiveness. Coursework in a social media degree can provide you with a deep understanding of content and ROI strategies that can make you a valuable asset in strategic communications as businesses optimize their use of social media in both content and metrics.
CONTENT STRATEGIES
Working in strategic communications as a social media manager involves developing action plans to meet your organization’s goals, creating content calendars, and developing visual design and web content strategy.
An organization with goals of establishing brand awareness, for example, might need to draw in the 25- to 35-year-old age group, who are significant users of social media and make buying decisions based on their findings. The social media team might develop a spokesperson for this age group who tweets daily to create awareness of the brand. The campaign strategy might include the spokesperson urging the audience to engage with promotions on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Pinterest. These channels will need coordinated campaigns. For the brand to remain consistent, their message, logo and tag line should be the same or similar across all channels. Though consistency is key, the content on those channels may need to be differentiated enough to engage users of each platform.
Conclusion
You want to bounce ideas off someone who knows their stuff. You want someone who can really listen, develop skills and expertise in social media and digital communications, and inspire others at the same time. All you need is a writing coach with great communication skills, a natural ability to put words together in meaningful ways, experience that’s informed by teaching at two universities, and years of experience crafting stories for digital audiences.