To be effective, social media needs to be highly interactive and also needs a constant stream of posts to keep your feed “live”. Within the SME arena, where often there is no dedicated social media resource within organisations, finding time to consistently feed social media with relevant posts can be challenging.
Help is at hand – Or is it?
One answer to this dilemma is to use a third party to support you activities. Whilst this can be a viable solution, it does have its drawbacks. At its best social media posting needs to be interactive and personal – it needs to be a conversation between your company and social media users engaged with your brand. On this level, it’s a challenge for a third party to know enough about your business to deliver this type of content. Here, the best person to post is yourself and we are back to square one.
The answer – Divide up the task in hand
Whilst a third party may struggle to handle the more detailed activity, they can create a “baseline” on which you can build the more interactive stuff outlined above. The fact is that not all social media content needs to be personal and conversational. Part of the purpose of social media posts is to develop and present your brand position and posts that deliver this can usually be handled by a third party that knows your business. This “baseline” of activity can then be augmented by the more detailed/conversational posts handled by someone within the organisation as and when they have time. Safe in the knowledge that at times where there is little activity in this area, the social media feeds will be kept live and up to date.
Maintaining the baseline
To illustrate this approach, I would like to take a little time to explain how we handle Social Media in partnership with our clients. In most cases, our job is to maintain a baseline of activity that re-enforces their brand, and helps tell their company story. This will usually be a mixture of third party content from agreed sources, and original material developed in conjunction with clients (usually in the form of blog posts that can be published on their website, and shared on Social Media.) Typically we would be aiming to post anything from daily, on platforms like Instagram and Twitter, to maybe weekly or even monthly on LinkedIn. With The likes of Facebook combing in somewhere in between. This activity forms a “baseline” of activity that can then be supplemented by posts direct by the client as and when they have the time and something to say. Irrespective of this activity, feeds stay relevant and up to date, accurately supporting the companies brand image.
A social media partnership that works
This collaborative approach works well ensuring that anyone browsing the feed to “check out” a company will get the right impression. without the need for day to day activity from within the company. Activity from within the company, when it happens, becomes the icing on the cake. Whilst this approach will not work in every situation, it does make a good starting point without the need for significant investment in internal capabilities. If anyone would like to explore how social media can be made to work for them, get in touch we would love to hear from you.
