Taking Your Company's Social Media Presence Seriously.

Photo by ivanpw

Often times a company’s executive or manager is passed down the task of creating or expanding their company’s or department’s social media presence. And often times, the solution is to hire someone who put on their resume that they know Instagram, love to tweet, and have a lot of Facebook friends. Or the solution is to just take someone from the department and ask them to learn Facebook and then get them going on the task. This way of thinking typically creates more problems than benefits for the manager and the company.

Firstly, one of the core elements in growing your company in a social media space is to create content. For Instagram, that would mean uploading public pictures, for Facebook and Twitter, that means lots of pictures and writing. It’s incredibly important to understand that your company’s reputation is based on your public outreach and there is no public outreach more penetrating than your social media. In most company’s a Public Relations position is highly paid, so why would you allow someone who isn’t experienced in public relations to just take over your company’s lines? It’s unwise to allow just anyone to speak for the company. This isn’t to say you need a highly paid Public Relations executive, it’s simply to say that you need to pay attention. Have a plan.

You should also have a general plan ready to go. Sure, you don’t do the whole social media thing, you focus on “the bigger picture” items. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have an idea of what the social media coordinator’s (let’s call it that) job description and content plan should be. Just because you don’t post on Facebook doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know what type of content you want posted online to represent the company. If you have a blog associated with your social media department, shouldn’t you be aware if the content is ok to post? What about the content used on your Facebook and Twitter accounts? It’s a good idea to do a little research and have some framework of a plan ready to go. You don’t want an employee sans a plan and an employee doesn’t want to operate in chaos.

Social Media is a must-have for almost any company type, and with that means a little extra focus from everyone who makes decisions.