Social media is an integral part of your online business operations by being another major communication platform to market products and services, promote the company brand, create new business, and connect with customers. Social media is also an influential collective of online communications channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing, and collaboration. Social media communication channels expanded into numerous sites and platforms for all types of consumers to share and communicate, but a few platforms are the backbone of social media. Social media’s backbone comprises Facebook (now Meta), Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and TikTok. Either they allow user communication through messages, photos, and videos, enable users to stream real-time events, allow users to post a short blog, upload short videos, post small pictures, share, and categorize pictures with internal links to the source, or share images with messages. LinkedIn does the same as the other platforms but designs itself around a professional’s career and works more as an online professional and networking resume platform. Many businesses use LinkedIn to seek qualified candidates for open positions within their organizations. These social media backbones are some of the early social media sites that began the spark to more locations than one person can count on the available social media sites today.
SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY FRAMEWORK
Brian Solis, a Digital Analyst | Anthropologist, created a conversation prism to give businesses an insight into the social media communication channels available for usage. Remember, I said that social media is a communication platform that is being used to develop business and connect with professionals who share in the organization’s industry. An organization can also use these platforms to have a closer connection to consumers and to improve processes and operations, therefore, designing an organizational social media framework. The framework and policies have expectations for designing the appropriate behavior for all internal and external assets working to avoid exposure to public embarrassment and legal problems. They also expect to utilize all social media benefits and minimize the risk of negative organizational impacts.
The framework should encompass two (2) divisions: Strategy Development and Engagement. Under the Strategy Development division, an organization categorizes ordered activities as (1) Prioritize Objectives, (2) Establish Governance, and (3) Define Activities. Under the Engagement division, an organization categorizes ordered activities as (1) Listening, (2) Engaging in Conversation, and (3) Measuring and Refinement.
Before an organization designs the social media strategy framework, the internal audience must first learn social media from individual personal usage from everyone. Another way to learn about social media is to study relevant social media studies and explore the latest trends. Learning social media can help a company increase its brand awareness within the industry and introduce consumers to the company.
STRATEGIC DEVELOPMENT DIVISION
Under the Strategy Development division, the Prioritizing Objectives activities navigate around the organizational values and mission. One main task within this activity is to attract and retain talented personnel who share organizational values while continuously working on the mission. Other typical priority objectives of the organization are to increase sales and gain more client-driven innovation. The organization does not operate with just a laser focus on sales and customers because the organization seeks to improve individual customer engagement with the proper brand and reputation management. The company sells to customers who want to engage more closely with each sale.
Establishing governance is a critical task because the organization needs to define acceptable, unacceptable, desired, and undesired behaviors among internal and external audiences. An organization also gains trust and establishes authority in social media with well-maintained company social media profiles by identifying, understanding, and clarifying opportunities and the risk of engaging with social media; and the risk of not engaging. The company’s established governance on social media should not involve total banishment from social media usage for internal and external audiences but involve more of the organization’s audiences having respect, loyalty, and leadership.
An organization defines the activities within the social media platforms. The internal and external audiences may use other social media platforms at their leisure, but the organizational leadership should build the social media strategy off dedicated platforms. The strategy will increase brand loyalty from the clients in their perspective industry. Increasing the organization’s brand loyalty on those dedicated platforms increases the customer base, increasing sales. An organization's defined social media activities should also include using trademarks by authorized organization personnel only. The trademark authorization should extend to executive leadership, the Social Media Manager, and designated personnel. All other company audiences, internal and external, must obtain permission to use organizational trademarks with the individual or group, social media posts, texts, tweets, etc. Internal/external audiences maintain the right to tag social media profiles in their posts if the posts show respect to the organization’s trademarks and respect to others. Any social media messages from internal/external audiences display disrespect for organizational trademarks or other individuals and can cause legal and regulatory issues or public embarrassment. The organization can deem these actions as improper, irresponsible, and unauthorized social media usage. Along with these definitive activities, an organization can desire for the internal audiences to use their time on social media in a productive manner that benefits the organization's operations and does not hinder the mission; or damage the values.
ENGAGEMENT DIVISION
In the Engagement division, Listening is the first step to engaging in social media with the organization’s social media profiles. An organization listens by identifying the relevant social media monitoring tools and finding the relevant communities and conversations that support the strategy. When engaging in social media, an organization should form conversations to discover what is said or not said about the organization and industry. The social media champions listen to conversations about the industry, new services, or new products to determine what the external audience thinks. An organization can gain insight for future marketing and product campaigns just by listening to the social media champions working to uncover the key influencers and target them with valuable company information.
Another activity under the Engagement division involves engaging in conversation with external audiences. An organization’s engagement means the organization will provide relevant content to engage the key influencers. The organization holds all internal/external audiences to respond positively to all content and to add value to the industry communities. The organization should aim to provide relevant content to all audiences to strengthen the social media strategy and improve the organization’s brand awareness.
Lastly, work to establish the Measuring and Refining activity to set relevant measures of success within social media. The organization should monitor those measures with social media analytics; therefore, organizational leadership will receive monthly activity reports from all internal/external audiences. From these monthly reports, use the information to ensure the strategy is strong. If the reports show the organization is not showing a strong presence, the organization must refine measures and strategies to bring a stronger presence and increase brand awareness.
An organizational social media strategy framework design is to identify internal social media champions to support the strategy and train the internal audience on responsible transparency of the organization’s social media presence. The organization should believe the social media strategy framework helps the organization handle complex social media issues and design the strategy to fully engage with the internal/external audiences to handle the immensely complex and fast-changing environment. With a solid social media strategy, an organization should expect to keep its internal/external audiences abreast of all organizational developments and develop a culture designed to appease everyone.