Hollie Clere, Author at The Social Media Advisor

October 4, 2020
Social Media Strategy

What Support Can You Provide Customers in Social Media?

In the Information Age, people have grown accustomed to heading to the Internet when they have problems, questions, or complaints. Successful companies understand the need to build a structure for troubleshooting, communication, and connection with their audience online. Social media marketing is known for being the place customers head when they need more information or they want to file a complaint of some sort. Why social media? Mostly because people are annoyed with long phone waits and cutting through corporate red tape when they have a problem that needs solving. Savvy businesses understand this and they have a plan for being present and responsive online.

Developing Systems for Social Media

Many customers will turn to social media as a way to connect directly with a brand. There are automation capabilities built into many of these social media platforms that allow you to be present for your audience and respond to inquiries, messages, and comments. Have a system or a plan in place to ensure that you are monitoring your social media engagement and being responsive to your budding social media community. This level of customer support and service is essential for successful businesses.

Processes for Troubleshooting and Concerns

As your business develops, are you documenting your policies and procedures for dealing with customer service inquiries, requests, and complaints on social media? You can create a document, with all pertinent information, on how to handle various issues as they arise and make certain that all team members who deal directly with customers have access to the information. This will ensure consistency across your company while keeping on eye on your brand integrity at the same time.

Create an Emergency Plan

Social media marketing is prime for public PR situations and crises so it’s important to be prepared to respond when one arises. It’s also essential to have a plan for power outages, cancellations, or weather-related issues – depending on what impacts your company. Your audience will turn to social media in an emergency situation and if no one is at the helm, posting updates and responding to questions, that may reflect poorly on your brand.

Many small businesses haven’t encountered much in the way of needing to communicate with their audience online but as that audience grows and the business and brand expands, this will change. Having systems and processes in place to deal with this before it is needed is just the type of forward-thinking strategy that keeps a business proactive instead of reactive.

Are you looking for a social media company to train your staff on online marketing strategies and equip them with the tools to maintain engagement, spark interest through Linkedin and other social media platforms, and build a solid foundation company-wide? Contact us to set up a training session for your sales team to improve your online marketing efforts.

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Hollie Clere of The Social Media Advisor is a “#BeAwesome” Developer, Social Media, Brand Builder, Content Manager, Trainer and Author in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and the tools to manage them.

Click here for Social Media Training, Speaking and Strategy Consultations.

September 27, 2020
Social Media Training

What Can Your Sales Team Learn About Social Media?

Your sales team is the face of your business, the front line of everything you do. They are the ones, out in the world, pounding the pavement, and living your brand in front of others. If you have a strong social media presence, your sales team can support you there as well. It can seem scary to have ‘too many chefs in the kitchen’ when it comes to your online presence, but a properly trained sales team is an organizational asset!

Here are some things to consider when training your sales team to represent your company online:

Developing Their Online Presence

Each of your team members should focus on building out a robust online presence for themselves, as a representative of your brand. The first step we recommend is building out a comprehensive LinkedIn profile. A well-built LinkedIn profile, since each social media platform is a search engine, allows your employees to attach their profiles to all the keywords that will help them get found as well as build credibility and authority as an expert in your industry.

Growing Their Online Presence

Once you have a baseline when it comes to an online presence, it’s time to build and grow that impact online. Many people say that blogging is dead, but that’s because people don’t understand the real power and benefit of regularly posting content online. By posting articles and blog posts on the company website, within LinkedIn, and on industry-focused publication websites, your sales team will expand their reach, increase their online searchability, and strengthen their credibility. The goal is to be found online in all the places where a potential client might look for information about you and your company.

Learning to Use Hashtags to Reach More People

First, your sales team needs to understand what hashtags are, how to use them properly, and how they impact online reach and presence. Then, they need to learn how to utilize those hashtags to expand their own reach by searching industry-related hashtags often, to engage with others, and participate in online conversations.

These are just three tips when it comes to training your sales team to maximize their impact online and add an Internet component to their sales strategy and goals.

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Click here for Social Media Training, Speaking and Strategy Consultations.

September 20, 2020
Social Media Marketing

How Often Should Your Social Media Manager Post for Your Business?

At the Social Media Advisor, we talk a lot about posting consistently. Consistency is the foundation of any social media marketing strategy. However, what consistency means for each business can look different. The point is to pick a posting schedule and have an editorial calendar and a plan for your social media marketing.

How, as a small business owner, to determine how often your social media manager should post for your business?

Schedule

Depending on the platform, the number of posts you should aim for each week can look different. Since most of our clients prefer Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn – we can tell you that, at a minimum, your business should be posting at least 3x a week to stay relevant for your audience and for the social media algorithms. (This amount goes up for platforms like Twitter and Pinterest.)

We also have clients who post 5 days a week and some that post every day. How often your business should post, within these timeframes, is usually determined by how much original content is already available to work with. Business owners that invest in a blogging or video strategy have more original content to pull from, making it easier to create more social media posts per week.

Too Many Posts

There are brands that post more often than 7x a week, which we don’t recommend. In our experience, posting more increases your opportunity to lose followers or to post content that isn’t seen. The way the algorithms work, the first post per day that starts to get engagement is the one that will be featured the most – burying any other content you’ve shared that day. This is a waste of time and energy. It could also be a strategic problem if your audience doesn’t first engage with the post you were hoping would get seen or shared the most that day. You can eliminate this problem entirely by posting no more than once per day.

Newsfeed Rotation

You may find that a post does so well that it will show up in feeds for more than one day. Social engagement is always the goal, so, a top-performing post may continue to get featured in the newsfeeds of your audience in an attempt to gain even more reach and engagement. This will, certainly, downplay any other posts you have scheduled until this one begins to lose traction. Notice when this occurs as it will be a good window into the type of content your audience prefers so that you can continue to get great engagement in the future.

Only you, and your social media manager, will be able to determine the right posting schedule for you. If you are new to social media marketing, consider the first few months a trial period where you pick different dates and times, and then check the analytics to see what performed best. This way you can build, and continue to tweak, your social media schedule to achieve optimal results.

Are you finding it is getting more difficult for you to post about your business in social media due to time and energy restraints? The Social Media Advisor team can create a custom editorial calendar for your business, create on-target messaging and branded images aligned with your culture, and get it scheduled each month – taking this huge task off your plate entirely! Ask us more about our Monthly Social Media Management service!

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Click here for Social Media Training, Speaking and Strategy Consultations.

September 13, 2020
Social Media Marketing

What Expectations Should You Have of a Social Media Manager for Your Business?

There are many different types of social media marketers in the world and they have a wide range of skillsets. Everything from social media managers that operate more like virtual assistants (create and share content for you but do nothing else) to social media managers that handle every aspect of social (including engagement, monitoring, and advertising). Before interviewing your manager prospect, what expectations should you be seeking as a small business owner looking to hire a new social media manager?

Connection

A quality social media manager isn’t going to just create posts for you in a silo. There needs to be a regular communication plan to check in with you about what is and isn’t working. You should have an expectation, and it should be in whatever agreement you sign, that there be active communication each month including a window of time to chat and discuss things. These calls should cover current efforts and plans for any future efforts, upcoming events, or promotions.

Strategy

If you’ve ever spent an hour creating social media content and found a few days later that it produced zero engagement or interest in your business, then you understand the futility of not having a social media marketing strategy. Many business owners approach social media marketing as a post it and forget it endeavor and then complain to other people about how social doesn’t work for their business. When it’s time to hire a social media manager, you should expect that they’ll work with you on a social media marketing strategy for your business that will help you produce results.

Reality

Too many small business owners do not really understand the role social media plays in their marketing efforts. While social media can produce sales, that’s not the purpose of social media marketing. If the expectation is that your social media manager will close business or generate sales for you, you don’t understand the difference between marketing and sales. Marketing is anything you do to create awareness and attention for your brand – essentially warming up your prospects for the sale. These efforts may generate new business for you but that’s not the purpose of social media marketing. Social media is about connecting with your audience, building brand awareness, and getting the necessary attention you need to earn the trust that will eventually result in a sale. It’s not fair to put all the pressure of making money for your business on the shoulders of your social media manager because that’s not what social media marketing is about.

Quality social media management and social media strategy go hand in hand. Your expectations going into any outsourcing situation should be built upon trust that you are hiring an expert that can move the needle forward for your business.

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Author: Hollie Clere

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