Creating More Efficient Social Media Processes

There are many ways to leverage your project’s web and mobile presence in our ever innovative world of outreach and communications technologies. In our day to day dealings with clients, we teach businesses, including real estate companies, non-profits, local authorities, and government institutions how to reap the most benefit from today’s most popular social media services, including blogs, online communities, Facebook, Twitter, and more. We are always evaluating the various mediums out there and strategically determining which ones are most appropriate for which clients. While doing some research in this arena recently, we came across a great piece, published by Mashable, offering some useful tips on how to create more efficient social media processes. We’ve highlighted a few helpful hints here:

Utilize Your Existing Team
Your front-line workers, who already support customers in different mediums like live chat, phone, and in person, should be leveraged to the fullest. Using these teams, who already know your products and services and have been trained in customer relations only makes sense.

Organizing Social Media Efforts
Beware of too much time spent “fighting over who owns what” when developing a social media strategy. Different stakeholders need to partner on this and work closely together on the structure and processes that are beneficial to everyone. It is not wise to ‘put [social media practitioners] into a box with too many guidelines’. They need some freedom to engage online.

Avoiding The Biggest Hindrance to Digital Creativity
While a triage system can be helpful for novice social media programs, make sure your communication process isn’t complicating problems. After all, social media is meant to make communications easier, not more tedious. The biggest issue is the amount of time it takes to make a decision internally. It is a time of ‘now marketing,’ or what we call ‘agile marketing’ — we cannot afford to spend too much time making decisions or creating elaborate processes of approval. We need to act quickly and nimbly; otherwise, the opportunity is gone forever.

Many Social Media Tools Perform Similar Functions
If you utilize several key tools and establish the right infrastructure centrally, it will allow a number of business units and geographies to use the same tool across the company. This will allow you to compare results apple-to-apple across various campaigns and negotiate global contracts centrally to achieve huge cost-savings across the company.

[This post was inspired by Mashable]