Why are so many brands still socially inept?

By Claire Waddington, marketing and communications manager, Isentia

It’s not a new concept anymore – so why is it that so many brands are still socially inept?  So many brands are still stumbling over small hurdles when it comes to using social media for marketing.

Why is this you ask? Much of it seems to be based on:

–    Fear of key and influential stakeholders

–    Fear of a platform that they don’t understand comparative to ‘traditional’ media

–    Fear of opening up the flood gates to complaints

–    Fear of not being able to resource another marketing pillar that won’t hit their target market

But, with nearly 50% of all online time spent on social media* you can be sure that your audience is spending a significant part of their day on one social platform or another, likely to be one that you choose to be active on. Social media IS now traditional media!

Given social media marketing has so many touchpoints, this can also be an ownership issue within large organisations.  Social media can often be owned by one, some or all of these departments – marketing, corporate communications, PR and customer service.  Political minefields then have to be negotiated in order to make sure that you have the right people in the room to even openly discuss social media.

If businesses don’t ensure that social media is part of the conversation from the outset, the problem will perpetuate and you will never be able to integrate it properly into your marketing. Social media fails are the stories that tend to get shared, and naturally the stories that your stakeholders live in fear of.  There are however so many great examples of brands using social media in ways that you don’t expect.

Hilton Suggests is a team of Hilton employees in many different locations who offer a ‘concierge service’ in their local areas, helping with things like restaurant recommendations and sightseeing. They are cleverly monitoring Twitter for mentions of certain cities and use this as an opportunity not to sell Hilton, but to surprise and delight consumers with tweets aimed specifically to address personal needs. Best of all, they never seem to push Hilton as a hotel provider, it is just about helping people with travel tips. A complete delight when dealing with a big corporation like Hilton.

Another approach to social is with a coherent and complete plan for all channels that work for you as a brand and can help present who you are and what you stand for. Canva (amazing home grown Australian design software) are currently doing this with beautiful images across all their social channels as well as their communications with customers:

By letting fear play into your development process you will end up with badly planned and even more poorly executed social media activity. So here are 3 simple changes you can make in your approach to social to help you instantly feel better about social media.

1. Start using social media to research your brand and your industry.

Ok so it’s unlikely that you can just launch into social by yourself.  Often social media activity needs to be approved by a panel of people most of whom are scared about even getting started. But social is a great way to research your industry and mentions of your brand as well as giving you a good idea of what influencers in your industry are talking about. Twitter advanced search is awesome but if you want to get your company stakeholders on board, a simple social media listening tool is a great place to start – and prove your case!

2. Bring social media up to the front of the conversation.

If you work with a creative agency like Two Social, the creative social media arm of Isentia, you should add social into your initial campaign brief. It means that social can be considered as part of the whole campaign rather than a last minute add on that won’t make sense. This way the social elements of your campaign will be much more integral to the overall success of the campaign and therefore much more likely to get buy in with the people holding the purse strings or final sign off.  Educating old-fashioned thinkers is important here!

3. Measure your successes and your failures

Marketers should be positioning themselves as a revenue-generating department. By not measuring social or neglecting to measure it properly you are doing yourself a disservice that is in fact really easy to resolve. Social media can provide you with all kinds of measurement – but don’t just measure Facebook Likes; determine what measures of engagement matter to your stakeholders and start there. You could look at engagement with your posts by channel to determine which works best for your audience, or even better engagement of your posts in terms of A/B testing headlines or images to really understand what appeals to your audience. By providing measurement, even if it isn’t always the results you hope for, you demonstrate that you are willing to hold yourself accountable which will gain you much more respect in the long run.

Claire Waddington is the Marketing and Communications Manager at Isentia looking after the Australian and New Zealand market. With data, reporting and accountability more important than ever, Claire works closely with sales to ensure marketing is seen as a revenue generator not a cost centre. Claire is a marketing automation enthusiast with experience across both B2B and B2C environments in utilising developing technology to improve marketing processes and results.

*Source: Globalwebindex Q4 2014