The communications sector used to be engaged in a game of tug-of-war between Marketing and Public Relations departments for the right to “own” social media. Depending on your perspective, the social space is either an additional channel for your advertising campaign or a portal for connecting and conversing with your audience.
Who should control Social Media? Marketing or PR departments?
Sometimes it’s a mixture of both.
Regardless, social is an ever evolving medium with complex algorithms that prioritize what content gets served up to whom. The difficulty in playing the social game is how those newsfeed algorithms work is so deliberately guarded by their creators that it can be hard to understand why something that worked before failed to deliver again.
Add to that the perpetual tweaks and updates that simultaneously makes the portals more enticing for users and creates careers for people who can analyze the changes and help navigate the new, NEW (new) world order.
How you approach content for social media channels depends on what you want to get out of it. But, here are a few examples that might help.
Can it be a resource for other departments?
In the electricity sector, power outages are a major customer concern. When there’s a major storm, people often naturally understand why their lights go out. But on a clear day, it’s harder to swallow.
In the colder months, powerlines can sometimes be affected by resonance frequencies and they begin to swing. The phenomenon is called “galloping lines” and it can be the reason homes and businesses lose power.
Creating a video (like this one) that explains how this can happen and sharing both on social media and with the customer contact centre provides front-line customer care staff with a resource to elevate service and understanding.
Fish when the fish are
Adweek recently published an article on the best times for posting to social media. Like telling a joke, the impact of your delivery can be dramatically affected by your timing. As sophisticated as newsfeed algorithms are, they are still beholden to the human element: the act of checking-in.
It’s not a replacement for quality, informative, entertaining content, but when to post will help increase the likelihood of getting your message out.
Use data
Most organizations are collecting oodles of data and there are stories to tell in there. Cision ran an article looking at this content a year ago, but it’s still relevant. A word of caution, though: diving into data can put you in for a long swim. It’s great, quality content that none of your competitors have, but it’s easy to get too deep that you become lost in irrelevance or skim the surface and fail to produce anything of substance. Dedicate the time to this project and you may find mountains of stories to tell.
Have a communications campaign you could use some help with? Contact me for a free consultation.