How to Maximize Your Social Media Presence with Minimal Effort

Estimated reading time:
2 minutes

Audience:
In-house marketers

Top takeaways:
• Missed opportunities result when social media strategy doesn’t involve all departments.
• Involve all departments with outward communications in planning social media promotional strategies.
• Allow online and offline channels to amplify each other.

It’s a fact of life that sometimes only the people who work in a company’s marketing department actually ever know what’s going with the company’s marketing strategy. New ideas get implemented with the rest of the company being none the wiser. And if your organization is like many others, internal social media strategy trickled in a little at a time, seeping through the cracks, but never quite fully soaking in.

This often spells missed opportunity for in-house marketers to leverage the many channels available to them throughout the organization to help them reach their goals.

I, myself, am in the beginning stages of performing a companywide analysis of potential missed opportunities in the way of social media promotion. We want to take full advantage of all the communications and channels we have available to us to let people know that we also want to connect on our Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts, and of course, our blog.

In this post, I’ll tell you how I plan to tackle the research and make little adjustments that can have impact on our social media exposure in the coming year.

1. Analyze Internal Communications

A great first step is sitting down with each of the departments in your organization (and you can simply do this with individual employees if your company is smaller), to find out who they talk to and how they communicate daily.

Then brainstorm ideas on missed opportunities for directing those people to social media channels. Everyone in the company has a chance to touch someone important to your business, including:

  •  Sales
  • Customer service
  • Account management
  • Technical staff
  • Creative staff
  • Accounting (yes, vendors are an important alliance, too)
  • Executive staff

This is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Depending on how each department or individual operates, the social media promotion will fit in differently.

For example, the sales department might start directing more traffic to your company blog for more information on your business’ area of expertise, or perhaps they’ll hand select articles that your company has written on a particular problem the prospect is currently facing. This is both helpful to the prospect and the sales funnel.

On the other hand, your customer service people who handle calls all day can take those opportunities to plug any promotions or contests that your company might be having on any given social medium.

The point being, if you’re an in-house marketer, it’s important to know where these missed opportunities exist companywide, and to secure wins with minimal efforts that integrate seamlessly into the activities these employees are already performing.

2. Assess Outward Communications

Take stock of every device and piece of collateral (digital or print) your department creates. Then do the same for every department and/or staff member (if a smaller company). Where are your missed opportunities to promote your social media?

This includes things like:

  • Print collateral
  • Web pages
  • Power point presentations
  • Newsletters
  • Business cards
  • Emails
  • Press releases
  • Multimedia like podcasts or videos
  • Client documents and deliverables
  • Social media (yes, promote your various social media through your social media!)

This is just crossing your “t”s and dotting your “i”s on your company’s day-to-day communications. Then you have to ensure that each new campaign you initiate also ties the social media into it. For example, if your company is heavily involved in industry conferences or tradeshows like we are, you have to think about how to work in your social media exposure into that marketing plan.

Well, those are my quick-and-dirty tips for optimizing your company for social media promotion. I’m sure we all have missed opportunities that can be seized with little to no impact on our daily routines. What are your ideas?

Jessica Lee is the founder and chief creative for bizbuzzcontent Inc., a marketing boutique that focuses on digital content strategy and professional writing services for businesses.

See Jessica's author page for links to connect on social media.

Comments (4)
Filed under: Social Media Marketing
Still on the hunt for actionable tips and insights? Each of these recent Social Media Marketing posts is better than the last!

4 Replies to “How to Maximize Your Social Media Presence with Minimal Effort”

Hey Kristie, thanks for your comment! Oftentimes, we have to work backwards, don’t we? Have a great weekend. Hope to hear from you again sometime!

We are spending some time on beefing up our social media strategy for the year and you make a really good point in #2 – if you want your existing audiences to start following you on social media, make sure they know about it! so simple, but there are so many places we aren’t doing that right now. Thanks for the heads up.

Very nice post Jessica, I really liked the way you categorized the internal and external communications.

With some print and online QR codes are becomming more popular to point to a web site and save the users having to type in a web sites address.

The QR codes can be printed and displayed all over and are used with Smart Phones of which there are now trillions.

Also don’t miss out by not publishing RSS feed.

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