Few businesses nowadays remain in the dark about the benefits of social media. Having an effective social strategy helps in all areas, from customer service to increasing sales leads. It’s no longer a question of whether or not to get on social media, but rather who your business should entrust with composing a social media strategy.
Agencies have a deeper understanding of using social media for business, and have the added bonus of being familiar with your brand’s unique demands. Thus, agency experts can combine their social media prowess and their client’s business challenges to come up with an effective organization-wide social media strategy. Here are only a few examples of benefits achieved by letting an agency advise your brand on social for your brand.
Security
Recent history shows that no company, no matter how big or regulated, is safe from mistweets and account hijacks. Such cases often carry a serious financial impact on the stakeholders, and devastating effects on the organization’s reputation. Agencies can help ensure their client has the right processes in place to guarantee that all social media accounts are up-to-par with security standards.
In order to avoid unsupervised account access or accidental messages, it’s important to set up an approval mechanism for messages coming out of official accounts, as well as a record of who is responsible for which messages. An agency can recommend a solution tailored to your brand’s needs. Some organizations prefer to make their authorship public, for example, by adding initials at the end of each Tweet; others prefer to use a social media management tool like Hootsuite to assign messaging to different team members privately, to be tweeted from the official account.
Good Morning Everyone! Customer Information and the Translink Twitter feed is now open. Nothing to report at this time 🙂 ^kt
— TransLink BC (@TransLink) August 27, 2014
Whatever system the agency recommends for your brand, it’s most effective when consistently used throughout the organization.
Education
With rapid growth and development of social media for business, brands are becoming more aware of the need for in-house specialists. As Hootsuite’s expert Rylan Holey has mentioned before, this doesn’t mean that the agency is out of the equation—on the contrary, scaling social across an organization means clients can employ agencies to point them in the right direction for a unified company-wide strategy.
Agencies have been focusing on social media strategy a lot longer than the company’s PR and Marketing departments. Their digital communications expertise and familiarity with your brand can help them create a social media playbook for the organization, made to fit the brand’s unique goals and audiences. Once the main goals are established, the agency’s social media experts can come up with the best way to communicate those goals to the rest of the team.
Content curation
Even if your organization has content writers on staff, it’s important to sit down with agency experts to help create a content plan that benefits the company’s bottom line. Anticipate the need for content around three levels of events: Blockbuster, or relating to major sporting events, holidays, or elections; Industry, which encompass conferences, festivals, or budget announcements; and Brand, which include product releases and annual/quarterly reports.
Predicting the need for content in advance will free up time and effort spent on writing interesting, informative pieces. To find out what content stirs up the most reaction from your audience, let your agency create a plan for your brand’s engagement analysis. Agency experts can help you decide which tools will create the best automated reports, such as ones generated by Twitter Analytics, or a social relationship platform like Hootsuite. These analytics will produce actionable insights to help improve your content plan on your own in the future.