In corporate social media, the stakes can be high. (As is the number of stakeholders.)
Social media is now an essential marketing and communication tool for companies of all sizes. But managing corporate social media is not the same as managing social media for small businesses.
As elsewhere, the social strategy of the enterprise should lead to results that contribute to the achievement of the overall goals of the organization. But in a larger company, you also have to comply with more people and rules than in a smaller company. You often have to balance efficiency and compliance requirements with real business results.
Let’s take a look at how an enterprise social platform can help streamline teamwork and help you achieve your business goals.
Managing social networks in a large company is not the work of one person. This includes input and approval from various teams in your organization.
Do you want to implement your social strategy and effectively manage everything? You need the right tools to standardize processes, protect your brand, and save employees time.
Here are seven elements of the best enterprise social media solutions for large organizations.
1. Business priorities
In large companies, the day-to-day management of social media can seem a far cry from the conversations in the boardroom.
To use social media effectively, you need a solid social media strategy. And to create a solid social strategy, you need to understand what matters most to business success right now.
What are the current business priorities in your company? What problems is the business trying to solve? If you know the answers to these questions, you can set SMART goals to guide your social efforts.
If you don’t know the answers, ask. A quick 15-minute meeting with the head of social marketing and the chief marketing officer can quickly agree on priorities.
2. Compliance and safety
Organizations in regulated industries are well versed in managing compliance requirements. But all enterprise-level organizations (and members of social groups) need to understand how advertising and consumer protection regulations affect their use of social media.
Compliance risks exist, but they can be managed if you have a plan and use the right social media tools to protect your brand.
We have an entire blog post on how to comply with social media requirements, but here are a few key points to keep in mind:
- Stay up to date with privacy, data security and privacy requirements. This may affect how you store or share information and photos.
- Be sure to disclose sponsorships, influencer relationships, and other marketing agreements.
- Make sure you control access to your social media accounts and have a social media policy in place.
If you’re part of a social networking group and don’t know what your organization’s compliance policies are, contact the legal team. Better to ask questions than put your company at risk with a seemingly innocuous (but inappropriate) social media post.
3. Crisis communications
Most large companies sooner or later have to deal with a crisis. (After all, 100% of all companies survived a global pandemic not too long ago.)
When it comes to crisis communications, your social channels are the fastest way to spread the word. The real-time nature of social media provides the flexibility to quickly adapt to changing conditions. But only if you have an appropriate plan and recommendations.
Make sure you have a crisis communications plan in place and that people are aware of it. Everyone involved with a company’s social media process needs to know the plan in case they need to act on it.
Your public social networks are also a convenient channel for direct customer interaction with your team. This inevitably results in comment and private message sections being filled with feedback or questions, which can sometimes be negative.
Have a plan so teams know how to respond and when to escalate. This is especially important if you have a dedicated social media customer service team. Your customer service team must be trained and prepared to manage all types of requests or responses.
You may also need to deal with a public relations crisis specific to your brand. Your company’s social platforms will play a role in brand messaging related to the PR crisis. A crisis communication plan ensures that you use social channels to make things better, not worse.
4. Analytics and reporting
On a social team, it’s normal to celebrate wins associated with vanity metrics like likes and comments.
But stakeholders at a higher level in the enterprise organization need to see real business results. Otherwise, it will be difficult for them to fully accept your social strategy and give the necessary permissions.
That’s why it’s important to communicate the impact of your efforts on social media. An analytics tool can help you keep track of the metrics your team has already identified as most important to your business.
When reporting your results, focus on measurable progress towards your goals. It’s even better if you can format your results in real dollars and cents. Demonstrate the ROI of your social efforts, or show how social media fills your sales funnel or drives purchase intent.
5. Approval process
Your social team should already be well versed in company social media compliance policies. But there still needs to be an approval process in place.
A clear process ensures that the social team does not post anything that is inappropriate or unsafe. It also means the legal team doesn’t hold up your flow of content ideas.
Choose an enterprise social software that helps streamline your approval workflow. This process should make it easier for the social group to share content with legal entities for timely review.
6. Social listening
Keeping up to date with all direct or indirect brand mentions can be tricky if you cover multiple social channels. An enterprise social tool with social listening capabilities is the key to staying connected to online conversations.
Listening to social media helps you conduct audience research, sentiment analysis, and even competitor research.
This also goes hand in hand with crisis communications. Being aware of what people are saying on social media about your company or industry is important for any business.
Being aware of any negative feedback about your brand can help your team act quickly and respond as needed.
7. Protecting the interests of employees
Does your company have an employee advocacy program? Engaged employees can share their positive experiences or promote company initiatives.
Protecting the interests of employees is a great way to build trust in a brand. It will also enhance your reputation with potential employees and clients.
But in a large enterprise, it can be difficult to keep track of everything your employees share without an advocacy program.
Whether your employees are promoting a product launch or posting job postings, there must be a process in place. After you provide recommendations for brand messaging and social media sharing, use your enterprise social platform to track the ROI of employee advocacy initiatives.
6 essential tools to include in your business marketing toolkit
Running social media at the enterprise level involves various moving parts in your organization. To effectively manage everything, you need the right tools to standardize processes, protect your brand, and save employees time.
Here are the top 6 enterprise social media solutions to maximize the social benefits for large organizations.
Enterprise Social Media Management: Hootsuite
There’s a reason Hootsuite is used by employees in over 800 Fortune 1000 businesses.
Hootsuite is an essential social tool for companies of all sizes. This allows teams to manage multiple corporate social media platforms from a single dashboard.
Built-in collaboration and approval tools make it easy to manage tasks, projects, and collaborate with employees.
For corporate clients, Hootsuite’s advanced features help you integrate other business centers with your social tools.
Employee Advocacy: Hootsuite Amplify
Amplify is an intuitive app that makes sharing employee content easy and secure. Your employees can use it to share approved social content with their friends and followers on the fly.
As part of a comprehensive employee advocacy solution, Amplify also helps increase employee engagement. Your people can easily stay connected and informed about what’s going on in your organization.
Analytics: Hootsuite Impact
Hootsuite Impact provides enterprise customers with advanced social analytics. You can track organic and paid campaigns at the same time. This data allows you to measure and analyze your social marketing efforts while improving your ROI.
Built-in visual tools such as graphs and charts allow you to create customized reports for different stakeholder groups. Everyone receives exactly the information that he needs, presented in an understandable form.
Hootsuite Impact also provides recommendations for optimizing your social strategy.
Study: Hootsuite Insights
Hootsuite Insights, hosted by Brandwatch, is a social research tool based on social listening. This allows your teams to perform instant analysis on millions of social media posts and conversations. You can find out what people are saying about you (and your competitors) online.
Built-in sentiment analysis tools also let you know how people feel when they talk about your brand or your products on social media. After all, measuring social impact is about more than volume.
Digital Advertising: Social Advertising Hootsuite
Hootsuite Social Advertising lets your teams manage paid *and* regular social media posts across multiple channels – all from one dashboard.
With the Hootsuite advertising tool, you can use detailed analytics to optimize your social goals at every step of the customer journey.
Your team can also analyze the performance of individual ads, ad campaigns, and organic posts so you can create a comprehensive report for stakeholders higher up in your organization.
Customer Service: Sparkcentral by Hootsuite
Social media is no longer an additional customer service channel. You must integrate help desk and customer care with an enterprise social platform to meet customers where they are.
Sparkcentral integrates customer requests and interactions through:
- SMS
- Social media channels
- Live Chat and Chatbots
- Real-time agent interaction
If the client sends requests across all your social channels, you are all set to provide a single, clear response.
You can also use Sparkcentral to create customer service bots. They answer key customer questions, reducing the time your agents spend answering frequently asked questions.
Enterprise Marketing Automation: Adobe Marketo Engage
Many enterprise marketers are already using Adobe Marketo Engage for marketing automation. Social data integration takes Marketo to the next level.
Source: Marketo
You can add social channels to your lead scoring platforms with Marketo Enterprise Integration for Hootsuite. You can then target potential customers with the right messages based on where they are in the customer journey.
You can also see lead information right in the Hootsuite stream. This makes it easy to get more potential customers into your sales funnel by adding details about their social activity.
Enterprise CRM: Salesforce
Organizations of all sizes can benefit from connecting their social data to their corporate CRM (customer relationship management) systems.
Social CRM is an important way to turn social fans into real business leaders with data that teams across the organization can benefit from. And Salesforce is the leader in CRM.
Salesforce can integrate with your social marketing efforts and extend customer relationship management to social channels. This is a great resource for supporting social selling.
You can identify and capture new customers and sales opportunities you discover on social media in the CRM you already rely on.
The Salesforce Enterprise Integration app for Hootsuite provides detailed information and activity history for Salesforce leads and contacts. You can add key social activities and conversations to your posts. You can also manage your Salesforce customer case information right from your Hootsuite dashboard.
Corporate Compliance: Smarsh
Compliance and security are big concerns when implementing an enterprise social media strategy.
Smarsh automatically reviews corporate and regulatory requirements and security issues with an approval workflow. All content is archived and available for viewing in real time.
All of your social media posts may also be legally suspended. They can be added to cases or exported as needed for internal investigations or discovery.
Smarsh & Hootsuite: Compliance in the Age of Social Media
Enterprise Collaboration: Slack
Slack has quickly become the go-to tool for enterprise collaboration. Remote workers and distributed teams are becoming more common. Slack helps these teams get things done.
The Slack Pro app for Hootsuite makes it easy to collaborate and communicate within a team. Employees can send social media messages directly to a specific Slack channel, user, or group right from the Hootsuite dashboard. This makes it easy to keep everyone up to date, all in one place.
You can use the Slack integration to collect relevant social information for each post. It also allows you to assign moods and add comments to each post.
From better collaboration to stronger security, these tips and tools will help your organization save time and empower your team to do more—right from your Hootsuite dashboard. Bring the power of social media to the tools that already support your business.