Strength In Numbers

The need to integrate social media into your corporate communications mix today is similar to making sure your company had a website 15 years ago: it’s a no brainer.

By: Lauren Dineen-Duarte, Communications & Social Media, American Express Canada

With sites, tools, rules and preferences evolving at breakneck speed, it’s important for any company to make social media strategy more of a priority than an afterthought. And whether you focus on one social media site or many, I’ve found through my work at American Express Canada that there are four consistent elements that must be applied to any social media program to achieve success.

 1. INTEGRATION

What’s attractive about social media is also what can make it extremely complicated. The ability for consumers to share and disseminate your company’s message across social media properties is a marketer’s dream, but it also requires decisions and strategies to prioritize where your company needs to be.

For companies that believe in the value of ‘fishing where the fish are,’ Facebook is an obvious choice. With more 500 million users worldwide, not having a Facebook presence is a huge miss for any organization. But when you combine that number with the worldwide usage of other platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and LinkedIn, the numbers of engaged users tops out over a billion. That’s a lot of potential eyeballs on your brand’s messages.

The thing to remember with integration is that people don’t use social media in a silo: they tie accounts together, posting Instagram photos on Facebook or automatically Tweeting LinkedIn updates. So even if your brand is only present in one spot, a ‘Like’ or a retweet might project your message into another arena, making it imperative that you understand integration.

 2. ACTIVATION

Unfortunately the “if you build it they will come” philosophy doesn’t work with social media. Look around on Facebook and you’ll find hundreds of brand pages with a handful of fans and no impetus for anyone to become one.

The key to social media success is as simple as this: have something to say. People don’t want to be sold to while they’re visiting their favourite social media sites. They want to be engaged, amused, challenged, and intrigued. They want stories, not sales pitches, and this can be a tough pill for some brands to swallow.

Keep content light, interesting and ultimately shareable. Take a critical look at what your company’s posting. If you didn’t work for this brand, would you really care about this or want to share the link on your own personal wall?  hy or why not?

3. AMPLIFICATION

Don’t be afraid to spread your message beyond your brand’s Facebook page or other social media property.  Whether it’s by engaging with a targeted group of bloggers to tell your story or having a brand partner exchange posts with you, the more consumer touch points your content has the better.

4. EVALUATION

Perhaps the least sexy step, but potentially the most important, the evaluation of your social activity ensures that success maps to your overall company goals. Not only is it a good opportunity to evaluate what’s working and what isn’t, it also allows you to gain consumer insights, which could help to improve communication and engagement from a very practical level.

As with any communications program, keep your eye on your KPIs, and stay nimble. Privacy laws, social media sites’ terms of agreement, and your own industry regulations can change very quickly in this space, so make sure that you’ve got partners or internal experts who can stay on top of them while you drive your brand towards social media success.

Lauren Dineen-Duarte is a co-lead of the social media task force for American Express Canada, and was the driver behind building the company’s Facebook page. Visit Facebook.com/AmericanExpressCanada for more info.