Social Media should be an integral part of your external and internal marketing and communications activities. Social Media tools can be used in a multitude of ways to aid communication within and between departments. Social Media can be an excellent tool for customer services. In fact the idea that Social Media is a discrete and isolated activity is a nonsense. Social Media tools can be used effectively by almost any department in an organisation. However, although many of the tools are free the time spent is not.

For many organisations managing communications is challenging enough, this is even more challenging when you are an emerging business and stretching your limited resources to ensure your targets are surpassed.

Good communication and engagement (both internal and external) have a massive, positive impact on business goals. There are numerous positive examples of the generous ROI that can be achieved, alas good communication and engagement are often the afterthought.

Let’s say you are in charge of your business’s marketing and you are in need of good social media actions. You know you need to be involved and spend spend more time on it, you know you want to experiment with some ideas, you know that other aspects of the business should be involved as well but it’s Monday and you’ve got a thousand things to do and inbox from hell to work through.

Social Media is still in its infancy and is developing rapidly and although some aspects remain the same much is changing, sometimes too rapidly. And managing a public business profile or page is a little bit harder. It’s not just about your opinion – it’s about the whole organization – its culture, its values and its people.

What some businesses fail to understand is that social media, despite being available to everyone doesn’t mean it should be – just because you can tweet, doesn’t mean you should. If you need professional legal advice, you’d head straight to a lawyer, right? Well, it’s the same with social media management – if you want it done well, but you have no knowledge, hire a dedicated social media agency.

• Do you know that your business Twitter account can be suspended for following more than a hundred users within a short period of time? And that your daily limit is 1000?

• Do you know that a new Twitter account can be suspended without warning after unfollowing a few hundred users within an hour?

• Do you know the limit of pages and people you can follow on Google+ in one day? Business pages are usually allowed not more than 50 follows a day. After that number you can hit the follow button as much as you want, but in vain.

• Do you know which of your followers see your @ mentions?

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Let’s talk money

It’s true that you can hire a social media manager who’d take over all your business accounts and look after the campaigns. However, can you picture the skillset of this one expert? We can – they’d have to be knowledgeable about Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and any other social media channel your business is or should be occupying. And that’s not all – they’d also have to be a copywriter, an editor, a web designer, a graphic designer, a search engine optimization expert, a community manager and an online marketer. This expert would also need to interpret the analytical statistics and take necessary action on them. In reality this is not one person, it’s several. Like these here.

Who’s the king?

You may have heard of the old saying “Content is King”. We’d like to add that the best content comes from the hands of professionals. Every good social media agency will already have a good team of writers, designers and thinkers – people who are thought leaders and can deliver great results. What an agency does is give those people the tools and the resources they need to produce more than odd tweets and photo shares. What is important is creating a complete campaign and a killer social media strategy – one that speaks with the voice of the business. Needless to say every social media strategy also needs to feel personal. And we like adding an element of fun to social media too; a fine balance between personal and professional.

Analyze that

What is the end goal? What milestones and achievements will let us know the end goal is insight…or not as the case maybe. You need to know what you are measuring and why and the person who works with social media needs to understand analytics and reports. What is more, they need to have the knowledge to act on those statistics. A social media agency can also provide you with monthly reports on all your social media activity, along with ideas for improvement and real action steps. You want to have someone on board who understands what needs to be done and has what it takes to turn a visitor into a subscriber and a subscriber into a customer.

We need to talk

Conversations are happening with or without you, so you need someone who can keep track of the various conversations happening. Sometimes it may be a negative comment, another time a troll will wander by or poop some spam, or, it might be a prospect looking for real interaction. In any case, the person managing your social media must be able to differentiate and know how to handle it.

Remember what you say out loud, unless recorded, is lost in time, what you type online is discoverable by someone somewhere.

Engagement matters, results – count

You have all the ingredients; you have goals, a strategy, plans of action and contingency plans, you have writers, editors, designers, and a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips. The engagement is good, the results are improving, you have seen prospects become customers and you have been able to focus on your core business.

You must have hired us already.

Convinced yet? You should be. If we managed to give you some food for thought, don’t snap a picture of it, but subscribe to our newsletter to receive more social media tips straight to your inbox. Alternatively, call us on +44 (0) 118 324 0101 if you want to hire our creative minds.