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Don’t Leave Your Social Media Strategy to the Marketing Department

David Packard, of Hewlett-Packard fame, once said that marketing is too important to be left to the marketing people. For social media, that statement is as true as ever. When customers need assistance, they expect companies to offer it quickly through their social media channels. If your company isn’t equipped to offer this assistance, you may be losing customers. Today’s successful brands are choosing to hire a social media team that is separate from their marketing team because a different approach is needed when dealing with the social media masses. Sure, marketing does have a place on social media, but to be effective at handling customer service requests, a social media specific team or a social media management company must be used.

Social media teams can leverage the stages of the buying cycle, connecting the right employees with the right customers at the right time. Consumers’ needs change when they are in the prepurchase, purchase, and the postpurchase steps of buying. This means that different employees are more useful to customers at different stages.

How can a business owner create a social media specific team that can handle customer requests as soon as they are received? Let’s take a look:

• Develop a social care team that can address all areas of social information efficiently and effectively.
• Organise departmental responsibilities in the social care team. Be sure to define roles and responsibilities among marketing, customer service, public relations, sales, corporate communication, human resources, etc.
• Assign specific employees from each department to social media tasks.
• Set up social media accounts and give employees access to social media systems.
• Create brand guidelines for standards, tone, and style of social media communication.
• Define specific goals based on key performance indicators such as response time, sentiment analysis, engagement, views and shares, and other important metrics.

When companies implement a social media specific team well, the results can be very powerful leading to the success and growth of the company or brand. To learn more about social media marketing and creating a social media specific team, contact the digital marketing agency Chester business owners choose, Social Buzzing.