The Blog Page 5 of 5 — Kim Townend

Some called it at the beginning of the year, and with each new announcement from Facebook in 2014 it became more and more apparent that the days of free product advertising were done.

OH NO!

What are we going to do?

I think that we’re missing the point a little bit here. The thing is, social media was never supposed to be about traditional marketing. Remember when it was just starting and it seemed infinite with possible uses? Guess what? It still is.

There are 2 things that I want to remind everyone of before we all start freaking out about the end of social;

Facebook is not the be all and end all of social media

It’s no secret that I’ve never been a massive fan of Facebook, the audiences I have managed on there have always felt like just that, rather than communities. There are other platforms, many more appropriate to the people that you’re trying to reach. Facebook is full of horrible, badly made content right now and something needs to be done to address that. Remember forums and using Twitter like a human being? There are loads of other places you can be to engage with people who like what you’re doing.

Social Media was never supposed to be about just marketing anyway

Content is supposed to be interesting to the people who are seeing it. There’s only so many “competitions” and artfully placed photos of your product that people can see and still find entertaining. What’s really happening here is that brands who haven’t really thought about what their social strategy is besides ‘um, reach?’ are in trouble.

As I’ve said before, social isn’t just for marketing, and your 2015 strategy should reflect that, or you’re going to be spending an awful lot of money on showing product pictures to people who aren’t very interested.

Social customer service is still woefully bad in most cases, and yet this is what changes brand opinion the most. This blog post posits that good social customer service allows you to be active in the social space.

Given all of this, you would imagine customer service would be at the centre of most social strategies. But it’s still not. If you want to win at social in 2015 I’d advise getting your product people, your marketing people and your customer service people in the same room and building a strategy out from there.

Good social customer service alongside finding a compelling way to talk about your brand will always be a good foundation.

This wasn’t supposed to be a rant, more a call to arms to remember why we got into this business in the first place.

I’m looking at this as a way to be more creative and hopefully use 2015 to do some of my best work yet.

In my line of work I’m often called upon to write social media strategy for brands and that’s good, I like helping people figure out how to build communities based around their offerings. Oftentimes it’s the marketing department that contact me. Again, as is to be expected as social media was primarily touted as a marketing channel. But here’s the thing.

It’s not.

I mean, it is, in that it’s great for marketing. BUT social media is also excellent for customer services, for product feedback, for sales leads and a myriad of other things.

A few years back, before social came of age, there was a big question about who “owned” social – the marketing dept or the PR folks.

I think it’s time for us to revisit this question, but instead of asking who ‘owns’ social, come up with a cohesive way of all departments working together to get the most out of social, and to ensure they’re providing a worthwhile service to their users/community/customers.

According to SproutSocial, 5 out of 6 messages to brands go unanswered. Now I can understand that not all of these questions are answerable customer enquiries, my time managing @GOVUK taught me that, but I’m reasonably sure more than 1 out of 6 is a question that can be answered.

Not dealing with your customer’s enquiries is hugely detrimental to your online presence, it doesn’t matter how good your marketing strategy is if the basics aren’t being taken care of.

So before you talk to an agency or a freelancer about helping you out with social, talk to the rest of your departments and get them involved. It’ll make them feel involved, it’ll make your job easier, and it certainly makes your customers happier.

This isn’t a new idea, but I thought it was worth repeating.