It’s only a hop, skip and jump until Christmas day. End of year parties colour our calendars and employees around the country are booking their leave.
Many businesses either shut down or fall back to a skeleton crew over the holidays so it’s important to include your social media monitoring and engagement into this roster.
If your customers could have operational, service or purchasing issues over this time ensure whoever is on duty is trained up and familiar with your processes to address and answer tweets or Facebook questions.
Hopefully your key staff will be happy to answer the occasional email, tweet replies or share updates on Facebook while they’re on holiday. But if not you’ll need to have an arrangement with your contact center or other staff.
Set up a roster so there’s always someone on ‘Social Media Duty’ throughout the holidays. They might need some training on how to deal with issues, negative posts or answer certain questions.
Make sure you have email alerts set up for DM’s and @mentions on Twitter and wall posts or comments on Facebook.
Check your Google Alerts are set up for company or product mentions in news articles or blog posts.
Create a resource of potential complaints and questions you could get and contact details for people in case the monitoring team need urgent support.
Fill your content calendar with daily posts, links and photos so they can be scheduled or posted by the person on duty.
Think about what advice or content you can share to be useful or entertaining. Take pictures of the office Christmas party, before people have too much to drink.
Add some misteltoe to your Twitter avatar and some presents to your Facebook page and get into the holiday spirit. You could update these for New Years.
To do: Select your ‘on duty’ team, set up the roster, create a support resource, prepare your content calendar, artwork and emergency contact list.
Merry Christmas to you. It’s been fantastic to share my social media insights and tips with you this year. See you in 2012 and in the mean time feel free to tweet me @JustinFlitter.
With Christmas only 30 sleeps away, many people are turning their attention to 2012 planning. While I’ll run through some tips and advice to help you manage your social media over the holiday period next week, today I want to get you thinking about 2012.
If a social strategy is not on your agenda right now it should be high on your to do list for the new year. Read more
A common challenge businesses have with Facebook and Twitter is whether each branch or franchise should have it’s own page or whether they should be promoted from a single account.
So the question is – one main Facebook page for the whole business and all it’s entities, or separate pages that are more focused and specific?
- Churches have this problem, where each branch have their own congregation, ministers and management team, they have their own stories to share and often don’t want their messages diluted with posts and discussions lead by the other branches. Read more
How important is it to be online the same time as your customers? Ie, businesses are traditionally 9-5, yet customers are online outside of work times. How important as part of a social media strategy is it to have your social media communications staff online and responding at all hours of the night/day/weekend etc rather than just being online during the traditional 9-5?
As a small to medium sized business you don’t need 24/7 coverage and you’re not expected to. Even if you did get a comment posted on your Facebook wall at 11pm at night, there won’t be many others up to see it before you get to it in the morning.
First rule of thumb:
If you post content you should be online at the same time to respond and engage. Read more
Providing customer support through social networks is a common way to build trust and promote a company’s commitment to their customers.
If you’re active on Twitter or Facebook already you’ve probably had at least one person post a question on your wall or tweet you for help.
Almost every day we see tweets from people about their frustration with contact centre wait times or confusion with plans and services they receive from a company. Leaving those tweets unanswered makes the customer feel ignored and unloved. Read more
Shocking right? What’s the point in having a Facebook page for your business if no one ever goes to it?
Now stop reading this article, open Facebook and think about the user experience.
Now back to me.
Read more
Writing a business blog has many benefits. But like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. it takes time, thought, strategy and great content to build an audience.
Just like with other social networks you want to get people following your blog through RSS subscriptions or email.
Business blogs are useful for:
- Building a reputation as a thought leader
- Sharing your research, insights
- Promoting your innovation or new services
- Sharing staff stories, projects and insights
- Recruitment
- Corporate news Read more
Two insights and observations for you this week that seem to be challenging for some businesses using social networks.
The first is restrictions on fan posts on Facebook pages
Open your Facebook and navigate to your business page. In the top right click Edit page and Manage permissions to get to this screen. Read more
Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter are social communication channels. You could think of them like Radio or TV, except they are way more interactive.
Facebook is massive, in NZ there are over 2 million people with profiles. Australia has just hit the 10 million mark.
For most businesses cutting through the noise even with great content and sharp adverts is tough. You can’t be everything to everyone so my tip this week is to ‘hyper target’ your Facebook page, make it niche, special and super relevant to those people you really want to engage. Read more
Do this Social Networking evaluation today.
Here is a little exercise you should do, especially if your business is NOT using social networks.
This is a stakeholder social media review. We want to find out which companies that impact your business the most are actively using social networks, and how well they’re going.
To make it easier and faster for you to find a companies Twitter or Facebook pages go to the company website. Social links are usually located in the header, footer or on the contact page. If you can’t find them their run a quick name search on both sites and google.com to double check. Read more
