When your company has multiple social media teams dedicated to various product lines, business units, and languages, then it’s a pretty good bet that you are doing social media marketing for an enterprise.
Rather than a team-of-one, your team is more like a bunch of smaller teams broken out into specialties.
Enterprise social media teams face an ongoing challenge: integrating with the rest of the digital marketing strategy. Scaling a social strategy means keeping messaging and content consistent even as things get more complex.
To learn more about how enterprise social media teams can launch an integrated social media strategy, we talked to Christina Martin, digital marketing for a national registered investment advisor. Martin has experience managing multi-national social media programs and field social media programs.
Here are three tips Martin says can help when it comes to launching that enterprise social media strategy:
1. Structure by Market
Martin says that structuring your team by target market is the most effective way to build out a social program. “Knowing the local customer is key to social, because you are having a conversation with your clients and prospects,” Martin says. She suggests that local agencies can sometimes be necessary if you’re localizing the content, since images and tone may change depending on the region.
2. Build a Centralized Governance Plan
“These decentralized teams should operate under a centralized governance plan, developed and administered by a centralized team,” Martin says.
This is critical for organizations that are bound by regulations and can greatly improve consistency in messaging. The central team, Martin explains, approves any and all social media channels that are launched and manages all the administrative processes of social, like passwords and usernames.
Martin says that a central governance plan for social should include:
- Page “rules,” including service levels for posting content (frequency and varied types of content) to avoid instances of abandoned social networks
- Crisis management, including response and escalation plans
- Social customer care service levels for responding to inquiries
- Central process for working with customer care to address comments/questions
- Consistent reporting to ensure the channels are performing to identified KPIs
- An on-boarding program for local agency support is also helpful for local marketing teams, helping them vet potential service providers
3. For Better Integration, Create a Committee
“I’ve found that an enterprise steering committee is a great way to break silos,” Martin says. That means looking across functions and identifying stakeholders in social media, from legal and security to corporate communications and PR.
“Communicate why each stakeholder is invited to the table and have a thorough RACI chart (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) to make sure everyone knows what is expected of them by sitting on the social media steering committee.”
Every key function should be included on the committee, so there are stakeholders present who represent each team’s goals.
Analytics & Accountability
Once you’ve launched an enterprise social media strategy that is integrated with every team, you can start thinking about how to track results from a micro and macro level. But what tools should you use? And what kinds of things can you do to make sure every team is on the same page? Watch the recording of our Enterprise Social Media webinar below to find out more!