Enterprise-sized companies, which are typically categorized as businesses with over a thousand employees, face certain challenges on social media that their smaller counterparts don’t.
It’s important to figure out where your strategy has to go beyond that of smaller companies, and learn how to overcome those specific difficulties.
Here we’ll discuss some key strategies for enterprise social media management. However, there are a multitude of unique challenges and solutions that come with managing a large brand on social and we’ll be taking a more in-depth look at those during an upcoming webinar with Sprout Social and Bitly all about “Enterprise Social Media Tools, Tips and Strategies”. Please join us!
1. A Diverse Social Audience
As your customer base grows, so will your social media audience. Whether your following grows organically or through some concerted efforts, a bigger audience means a wider variety of demographics and personalities. Not every piece of content will resonate with every reader. Here are a few ways to make sure you’re doing your best to engage.
Social engagement is key. One key strategy is to figure out which of your large audience actually engages with your social media posts and create content you know will resonate with them.
You can use tools like Bitly and Sprout Social to see where those engaged followers are, when they’re online and what content they’re most likely to share. Use that information to inform your publishing strategy.
You can also listen to social media for trends associated with your brand. Figure out exactly which topics and hashtags your customers are most often associating with you and leverage that knowledge to create posts you know your audience will enjoy.
2. Multiple Locations and Languages
Many enterprise-sized companies have locations all over the world, and with that comes a variety of audiences who don’t speak the same language (in more ways than one). While this diversification and expansion is good for the overall business, it poses a series of unique challenges for the central social media team. It is impossible for one person to understand the language and cultural differences of such a large audience.
Therefore, it’s important to have a team of community managers that can respond to social media inquiries in the languages that they arise in and create content that speaks to each individual culture – all while following overarching brand voice and guidelines.
For example, McDonalds has more than 36,000 restaurants in over 100 different countries. If they plan to effectively respond to all of their inbound messages, they’ll need to make sure team members are comfortable with the languages and cultures of those locations.
One way to help with this complicated challenge is to create individual social media profiles for each geographic location. Each page should have a content and engagement strategy associated with it and a social media manager who understands the language and culture and is charged with maintaining and engaging on the handle or page.
The number of pages you create and how granular you should approach this strategy should depend on the amount of engagement you’re seeing per location and the amount of social media managers that you have available. Though these pages are all separate, you can use a social media management tool to centralize all of the engagement and reporting in one place.
3. Breadth of Product Offering
Social media managers are required to knowledgeably speak to the products and services their company provides. Having an intimate understanding of products helps social managers provide great customer service quickly and efficiently, and should decrease the time it takes for them to respond – which is important, since 42% of customers anticipate a response within 60 minutes on social media.
Large enterprise companies often offer a wider breadth of products than a local shop, so it then becomes a matter of more importance for social media managers at that level to study the products and services that they offer.
Take a brand like Electronic Arts, for example. They offer a massive library of video games, each with an intricate plot-line and list of characters. However, their social media team is able to effectively engage with even the most specific messages with a consistent and relatable voice.
That doesn’t mean you need a ton of different social managers each with different knowledge of products and services offered. Instead, encourage all of your social team to take time out of their day to study your catalog and learn more about your business. You can also build out internal resources like FAQs to help your team navigate conversations on the fly.
As social evolves, so do the challenges that come with it. However, if enterprise brands understand their audience and adapt as it changes and expands, they can reap real benefits for their business.