Social media connects more than 2 billion users worldwide. How effective is your digital marketing team at harnessing that power? Can you resist the allure of the extremely higher conversion rate that this powerful medium can offer to your business?
According to a HubSpot estimate, 84% of B2B marketers use social media effectively to harvest a 100% higher lead conversion rate.
In the words of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, “People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best-broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.”
Social media strategy is all about connecting with a wider global audience to learn more about them, engage with them, create brand awareness and establish your brand as an industry leader! Your business needs an effective marketing team to help you reap the maximum benefits of social media.
The success of your social media efforts depends on the efficiency of your social media marketing team’s ability to build relationships and brand awareness by actively engaging your target markets.
Below is a list of the 10 essential skills to help your social marketing team develop the perfect strategy to help your business identify better leads and more marketing opportunities to contribute to the growth of your business.
1. Managing Communities
Managing your brand’s reputation on different social platforms is crucial to creating brand awareness and establishing your brand as an industry leader. Building communities that effectively engage with one another are crucial to the success of your business. Such management requires active participation in discussions, answering questions and keeping clean and safe forums by keeping spammers at bay.
To successfully manage online communities, social media teams should facilitate healthy and positive discussion between community members by answer questions in a logical manner, setting the right tone for discussions and deleting offensive and abusive comments.
Social media teams need to have a plethora of knowledge on their products and applications. They must exhibit empathy while being firm and establish a following with the help of engaging and interesting conversations. Studies by the Marketing Science Institute reveal that managing communities on social media will help increase revenue by 25%.
2. Time Management
According to a survey by Search Engine Journal, 53% of users expect a quick response – often within an hour on Twitter. Social media users especially expect a quick reply to their complaints or questions about a company. In our fast-paced world, users do not have time to wait to have their issues resolved.
The same survey also reveals that 72% of users expect their complaints to be resolved immediately upon tweeting the issue. At the same time, efficiently managing time on productive tasks is a challenge. Social marketing teams need to concentrate more on productively engaging the audience.
The social media team needs to spend time on monitoring various social channels to understand the trends, schedule SocialPilot posts on a regular basis, create engaging content and encourage and participate in productive and positive discussions.
3. Attention to Detail
Social media teams must pay close attention to their activities because social platform posts can either make or break your brand’s reputation. An oversight or a typo can ruin your image because social media action have a lasting impression. Even deleting an incorrect post is insufficient damage control because there could be a screen shot of the post or a tweet saved by a user which can be used against you.
There are a great number of precedents where simple post or tweet typos have damaged the personal and business reputation of those who made them. The marketing team for Susan Boyle, a contestant on the Britain’s Got Talent reality show, suffered a rather embarrassing situation when a typo in the hashtag #Susanalbumparty, intended to promote her album release, was misconstrued by many.
4. Analytical Skills
Digital media is all about analytics. Your team should be able to gather various data, interpret it and develop a killer strategy for your specific business. You need to track, interpret and analyze the competitors’ data and/or your own company’s previous data in order to arrive at important decisions. This data includes things like audience demographics, social engagement, posting frequency and habits and account growth.
Your social media team can use a plethora of automated tools to help you analyze large volumes of data associated with measuring performance, reach and effort engagement in reaching out to the wider audience.
4. Flexibility
Because technology changes and improves on a daily basis, new tools with improved features frequently pop up to attract the user communities. Your team should be flexible and quick to learn the basics of engaging users on such latest tools.
This does not mean that your team needs expertise on all trending social media platforms and tools; however, they should know the basics of using these tools to engage your target audience. The key is to spot the trends developing in the social media space and to start building communities before your competitors do. Brands like Taco Bell, GrubHub and others that identified the emerging SnapChat platform SnapChat, early and built business communities enjoyed a greater market reach.
6. Organizing
Organizing the daily tweets, posts and other social media activities for engaging your audience is an important activity of your team. A well-organized team will monitor your social media calendar and plan your content accordingly. It is important that your social media team keep a record of the ongoing conversations, posts and conversation histories.
Many social media dashboards can be used to organize your various platform and community activities in order to track your schedules and make effective use of social media engagement.
7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Social media skills need to include search engine marketing skills, but social media and search engine skills are interdependent. SEO skills have become indispensable for social media teams and your team needs to understand the different keywords that users type to find information on the products and services that you offer.
An article in Search Engine Land reveals that the secret of successful companies is their ability to integrate social media strategies. Those struggling with SEO are unable to integrate social media into their search marketing.
Your social media team needs to keep itself abreast of the best practices in search engine optimization in order to make the most of the social media platforms. Keyword research, link building and content marketing are some of the important SEO skills your team needs.
8. Writing
Your social media team needs to have impeccable writing skills. Great content attracts users, educates and informs them of your products and services in a positive manner. Creative writing, with an element of humor, will go a long way towards engaging a wider audience.
Web writing is an entirely different ball game as you only have a matter of seconds to make a lasting impression on your audience. You need to impress them with great writing so that they click on your posts, tweets, etc. Web writing requires using killer headlines, short paragraphs and lists so that your content is visually appealing and easy to read by the target audience.
9. Creativity
Repetitive and boring content puts off your audience. A survey conducted by BuzzStream and Fractl revealed that 21% of users would un-follow a community for publishing boring and repetitive content. Engaging content, fun-filled contests and videos keep users glued to a community.
Your social media team needs to think creatively in order to stand out amongst the crowd and attract users with engaging content. Frequent daily posts or a lack of engagement also results in users un-following a community on a particular social media platform. Your team needs to strike the right balance between posting engaging content and publishing just enough daily posts.
10. Sales & Customer Service
Social media is more about engaging your audience than making a sale. Still, you do not want to lose opportunities to convert a lead into a sale. This becomes a tricky situation, as you cannot be a pushy salesperson but you need to convince your audience that your product is the best that they need. Your team needs to strike a balance that includes subtle sales techniques to help you reap the benefits of social media marketing.
Social media platforms are great tools for delivering stellar customer service. According to a survey conducted by J.D. Power and Associates, about 67% of customers use social media platforms to get their issues resolved. Your social media team needs to exhibit empathy, be polite and professional, offer quick resolutions to customer issues and be willing to go the extra mile when required in order to see a smile on your customer’s face.
Your social media team needs a combination of many skills to create the right effect on your target audience. Effective engagement can be used to reach out to a wider audience. In essence, engaging your target market on social media helps you with powerful word-of-mouth advertising. Your loyal customers spread the word about the positive aspects of your products and services which results in your brand receiving wider recognition and the result is that you get referral business.
Sawaram Suthar
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