How to Hire the Perfect Social Media Company
- Align to business goals. Align your efforts to business goals and objectives. Know whom you are and where you want to go. Align to business goals where social can have the greatest impact.
- Slow down to speed up. You must stop the Random Acts of Marketing (RAMs). Taking time to slow down to speed up can actually help you zoom faster as you will be better able to align to business goals and objectives. You’ll also know how to better inspire and connect with your audience.
- Know Your Audience. You can never go wrong by investing in communities and candidates within them. The more you know about your audience, the better your results will be when it comes to building communities. Not only should you know the demographics of your audience, but know what keeps them up at night. What problems do they have and how can you help them solve the problems?
- Humanize it. Humanize your brand and business from the inside out. Social Recruiting is going to reveal your culture, regardless if you want it to do such or not. Your brand is much bigger than a logo, colors or tagline. Your brand is everything you say, tweet, pin, post, share and do. Embrace the imperfect, perfection of your organization and people inside of it. Let your employees be human and know they are going to make mistakes.
- Don’t starve your community, feed them the good stuff! Focus on the needs of your candidate audience. Don’t just create content that fills a space on a Facebook wall. Focus on delivering the highest value content for every post, tweet, and photo upload.
- Provide a safe and open environment. Provide your community with structure and safety. At the same time give them room to grow, learn and even fail.
- Create experiences. Create an emotional connection with your audience and community members that are memorable. Strike an emotional chord. Make them feel something. Earn their trust. Make every click they make, every turn they take on your online platforms and social network profiles an experience. Keep it consistent but fresh. Give them something to look forward to. Make it a top goal to create the best possible customer and user experience both on and offline. Make every brand touch count.
- Embrace the OPC (other people’s communities.) Tap into the power of influencer recruiting, brand advocacy and partnering with other community leaders. This must be done with integrity and value for the time and resources of the community members, influencers or advocates of which you want to partner with. Don’t expect that free “exposure” is going to inspire them to provide you with free earned media, real estate on their blog and Facebook timeline or access to their community they have likely invested years in delivering value and nurturing relationships. Respect them and they will respect you, your product and your brand.
- Measure it. You don’t know what you have or don’t have if you don’t measure it. Set goals, and key performance indicators (KPIs) early on in the process of community development. Leverage the KPIs to modify plans and tactics to respond with flexibility to the changing needs of your community. Don’t just focus on follows, likes and vanity metrics. Select KPIs that will help you measure success and foster relationships.
- Get a life. When all else fails and you are finding it challenging to inspire and connect with your audience, take some time off. Get outside, enjoy a local cultural event or hit the beach.
This article by Jeffery Giesener was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.
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