Last Updated 2 years by Emily Standley-Allard
Social media is without a doubt an essential marketing tool for businesses of all kinds. As many as 74% of people turn to social media when deciding what to buy, meaning that a strong social media presence can impact a massive number of potential customers. Here are 3 brilliant ways to unify your social media marketing team and reach new milestones in your business.
It’s a fact that businesses often struggle with a fragmented social media team. This can lead to a breakdown in communications.
For example, it’s not unusual for a distributed social media team handling multiple platforms to become inconsistent.
The business’s overall social media strategy can become inconsistent as a result — making it much harder to align social media with branding, marketing and sales.
Keeping your social media marketing team on the same page is essential if you use social media to market your business.
1. Build a Cross-Platform Social Media Strategy
Often, a social media team’s unity breaks down when the team is managing multiple social media profiles. Over time, the team may drift as employees working on different platforms develop their own strategies and best practices.
Even if these practices are unified with your business’s overall marketing and branding goals, this lack of communication can make your social media team less effective and consistent overall.
A cross-platform strategy will help keep your social media team on the same page. This strategy will govern how your team works across social media platforms.
This strategy should ask and answer a few key questions. You should have an idea of who your audience is, as well as which channels they use. The strategy should also consider how you want the business to appear on social media.
These questions will guide both big decisions about your social media strategy — like which platforms to use — and small ones, like how to respond to a specific customer question.
Technology can help your team stay unified. Cross-platform social media management tools ensure that everyone on your social media team is working with the same platform.
This means that you won’t have team members developing platform-specific workflows or social media management strategies.
Everyone on the team will also have instant access to important content and posts, regardless of which platform they were posted on.
Developing a content calendar will also help to keep the team unified. This calendar creates timelines for your business’s social media content. Your team can use it to visualize how content will move from concept to creation to a post.
If your social media team is all drawing from the same content calendar and strategy, it’s less likely that they’ll drift apart while managing different profiles.
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2. Adopt a Remote-Ready Management Style
Many businesses are pivoting to remote work for this first time, and both managers and employees are still adapting to the new style of working.
Going remote can come with a lot of benefits, but it can also create new challenges. Workers may spend much more time on their own, only communicating with team members when it seems absolutely necessary. Communication between teams can be more difficult, as well.
Finding ways to make your business’s remote work more sustainable can help.
For a social media team, building a content calendar and unified social media management platform are great places to start. Businesses should also identify and reduce barriers to communication with chat, collaboration and email tools that make it easy for team members to talk and store important files in accessible locations.
In addition to helping your team stay connected, these tools will also help the social media team integrate with the rest of the business.
It’s also important that you find ways to keep workers involved in the business’s culture, even when a portion of your employees aren’t in the office.
Businesses that prioritize sustainability, for example, often look to minimize or offset employee travel, and use reward programs to encourage employees to adopt sustainable practices at home. Other businesses have hosted digital happy hours and events to encourage socialization and communication beyond day-to-day work.
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3. Integrate Branding, Marketing and Social Media
Once you feel like your social media team has started to become unified, it’s also good to think about how the team fits into your overall business structure.
A truly cross-channel strategy builds on your cross-platform strategy to unify all of your online marketing and sales efforts. It will mean that a social media team is aware of big changes made to the business’s online presence, like new marketing campaigns, so they can more effectively respond to customers online.
Each member of your social media team should have an idea of what each other member is working on. The team lead should also know what’s happening with the rest of the business, including overall marketing and branding goals.
This helps ensure that everyone on the social media team is making informed decisions. It also means your social media experts know who to talk with if they have a question about process or strategy. This will make it easier for workers to keep their decision-making unified with the rest of the business.
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Social media marketing is essential for most businesses, and especially for businesses that rely on online marketing.
An effective social media strategy requires a team that works well together and has the resources it needs to succeed. A content calendar, cross-platform social media management tool and remote-ready management style will all be essential.
The social media experts at your business will also need to communicate often with other teams. Familiarity with your business’s branding and marketing strategy will help them to create social media management strategies that are in line with your overall business goals.
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The Author:
Eleanor is the editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine. She was the director at a marketing agency prior to becoming a freelance web designer. Eleanor lives in Philly with her husband and dog, Bear.
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