In this article, we’ll look at how your organization can best position itself on social media within the next five years.
We’ll also highlight some of the pitfalls of a successful social strategy, and point out what you need to avoid if you’re going to succeed. 🏆
Firstly, it’s important that each of your departments have its own team dedicated to handling social media.
This might be a new role for some organizations, so it’s important to begin building early on.
Your teams should consist of Community Managers looking after Social Media Content, Growth Hackers focusing on scaling up user acquisition efforts, and Data Scientists leveraging predictive analytics to inform decision-making processes.
You may find it advantageous in time to integrate Chatbot developers into these teams, but we’ll cover that in a separate article.
This could be you! [picture of the author] 🙋♀️🙋♂️
It’s worth noting at this stage, that there will be no need for an SEO department moving forward.
Search engine algorithms are constantly evolving to reward high-quality social content and punish clickbait and fake news stories.
The days of buying links and redirecting websites to inflate your search rankings are over — so say goodbye to Google penalties and manual actions.
It’s time to go all-in on social media marketing.
We understand that many organizations still employ agencies & contractors in addition to full-time employees when it comes to generating social media content.
But the reliance on agencies will dissipate over time, as your in-house teams grow and you begin to see a return on investment.
Medium has already begun showing signs that their phase-out of sponsored content is underway, following their recent update that sees non-organic posting limited to one post per week.
This should be an industry-standard moving forward.
As users continue flocking to social channels seeking authentic interactions with brands, advertising dollars should gravitate away from vanity metrics such as impressions and clicks and into engagement rate and influence scores.
It’s important that we avoid turning our beloved social networks into ad-hoc versions of Google Adwords — where we’re constantly barraged by invasive banners trying to sell us products we’ll never need.
You’re probably thinking, “where does this leave my SEO rankings?”
Well, there’s no need to worry.
With the right social media strategy in place, you’ll continue to rank organically for many years to come.
You might even find that your content is ranking higher than it ever has before! 🤔
Your teams will be responsible for creating engaging original content (not just reposting what other people create) which will tell a story about your brand and resonate with your target audience through topic serendipity.
They won’t be restricted by word count or page layout design, so they can take their creativity as far as they want to go.
A lot of marketers are making the mistake of assuming that all social media users want to see ‘marketing speak’ — but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
If you’re only using social media as a sales channel, you’ve already failed at winning people’s hearts.
Your content will help demonstrate your expertise in your industry by solving problems, sharing announcements, and engaging with customers when they have questions or complaints.
This isn’t all that different from what goes on in traditional marketing, so people shouldn’t really need an introduction to what you do.
Just remember that everything is open for discussion on social media, so always reply with empathy & positivity when someone tweets something negative about your brand 🙃
As 2021 rolls around, all of your work over the past couple of years will be starting to show the fruits of your labor.
By this point, you’ll be able to see solid growth in engagement rates, social media referrals to your website, and most importantly — revenue generated from social spending.
We’re not saying that you should abandon other channels like paid search or email marketing (just yet), but it’s important for teams to stay focused on their KPIs 💪
We often tell companies that ‘social first’ should not be a tactic, it should be your strategy.
If your whole business model is based around generating referral traffic via social networks, you need to rethink how successful your company is performing as a whole.
Your efforts will really begin paying off once influencer marketing becomes mainstream.