Marketing a company’s logo and products on social media makes it easy and affordable to promote brands. Social Media Today reports that over 90 percent of all marketers use some type of social media for their business promotions.
This reflects the ease and convenience of social marketing, but also the changing demographics of social networks: more middle-aged consumers with greater purchasing power utilize these networks than do teenagers and young adults.
A company looking to capitalize on social media marketing can put together a “dream team” of professionals in order to get optimal results.
Social Management
Consider social marketing more than an offshoot of a marketing department. Think of it as its own branch of the company. Unless you can count the number of workers you employ on one hand, selecting a manager or coordinator for social marketing helps to keep every blogger, Tweeter, and Instagrammer on the same page.
A manager should understand both digital and physical communication, be capable of using Pinterest to display images while printing off hard copies and using a postage meter to send them through snail mail. Much of their time will be spent sending memos or letters through postage as the employees under them work online.
The UK-based business advisory group of SalesForce suggests that your manager have better organizational and project management skills than social media skills, since the latter can be found more easily than the former.
The Numbers Guy
Any company, no matter its size, has heard the term “ROI” so often that it may as well be tattooed into an owner’s forehead. This metric has great value because numbers do not lie about which departments and products pull their weight.
You need not hire a financial analyst to study minute changes to YouTube video viewership, but Mashable urges a company to include a person in their social media team that understands the statistics of social media and the value of measuring performance.
Seek out candidates, internally or externally, who combine business skills with digital acumen in order to determine the social media campaigns that need a shot in the arm and the ones that have been performing above expectations.
Visuals
If you believe that the Internet generation’s attention span has denigrated due to the instant availability of information, a picture in your social media circles can be worth much more than one thousand words (or 8.54 Tweets).
The images you produce and display on social media need to be much more polished and professional than the written content, since only a little bit of the written content will be consumed while the pictures become scrutinized.
Hiring a visual designer to work with photos and videos helps to maintain a strong image of company and products. Spark Growth Partners recommends that companies maintain no fewer than four separate visual-imagery social networks in order to quickly and easily market pictures.
This does not take into account video social media like YouTube and Flickr; choose a candidate with experience shooting and editing both still photos and video.
photo credit: francistoms | cc
Jon Rognerud and Chaosmap work with Fortune 500 companies, small business and entrepreneurs to create digital traffic strategies that scale up customers, leads and sales with profitable returns. Mr. Rognerud wrote a best-selling book (Buy On Amazon), “The Ultimate Guide To Optimizing Your Website” (Entrepreneur). Connect directly here.
