3 tips for turning your team into a crack social media unit

With today’s digital lifestyle, your online reputation is everything and it’s important that you manage your image online continuously, aggressively, and actively, without ever being side tracked. This is easier said than done, unless you follow a certain process to effectively manage it. A solid understanding of all the social media channels you are using is vital if you want to be innovative and progressive on the social web.

Being active on social media will help you to build your business, improve revenues, increase your customer base, have more satisfied clients, and be the “go to business” over your competitors, amongst other things. If you are in a large organisation and want to get the ball rolling with your social media campaign, how are you going to do it? Who is going to be in your social media team?

Having a team of dedicated employees with a senior manager is required to manage a strong social media marketing campaign if you are in a very large organization. I don’t mean that you should have a team of people who are only interested in social media, but you need people with time, skills, and resources that understand social media and what you want to achieve with your campaign. Most members of your social media team should understand your industry, your services, weaknesses, strengths, and your competition. This team should also have good communication skills so that they can carry the word out about your business.

What is this team going to do?

1. Proactively monitor the web

There is quite a lot of work involved in monitoring what is currently being said about your business online. Monitoring (listening) is an important and a very labour-intensive skill. It’s not just about monitoring what is being said online, but also providing the right responses where appropriate.

Monitoring should also be expanded to track any news in your industry and listening to what your competition is doing on the social web, tracking star brand influencers, and anything else that relates to your market. All the insights you gather from your monitoring program can be used to your advantage.

2. Create magnetic content

Your social media team should focus on expanding your online presence by creating “magnetic content” on a regular basis that can increase your online visibility. This will also increase positive sentiments about your business on the search engine result pages. They can tweet and retweet valuable industry related information on a regular basis and provide solid reasons for your customers and prospects to visit your Facebook pages regularly and follow you on Twitter.

3. Analyse your metrics aggressively

Your team should understand the importance of analyzing your metrics and how this information can be used to your company’s advantage. They should clearly understand your competition and always be on the lookout for what they are doing and what is being said about them, what brings in traffic to your profile and what drives conversions ( use analytic channels like Google Analytic). Measure the outcomes your email or ad campaigns and run these statistics by the marketing or sales team to determine how customer behaviour changes on the social web.

Apart from having the right skills to manage your social media strategy, your team should understand that the internet never sleeps and new opportunities can be found and lost in a blink of an eye.