Dr. Jekyll's Social Media Strategy

Welcome to the 3rd post in our Halloween series - Social Media Tales from Beyond!  In this tale you'll find that sometimes a strategy that looks good on the surface has a dark side beneath.   If you missed the first two posts, you'll definitely want to review these gruesome tales that will address your social media concerns and keep you from turning into a social media horror story!

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Brenda had questions about social networking.  She knew it was something she needed to do but she was very focused on growing her new business and decided the best thing she could possibly do for herself was to hire an expert. 

She had seen a few people in her Facebook newsfeed posting about their career as a social media manager.  One person in particular stood out.  This lady dropped all the right names, posted about the latest social media conferences she was attending all across the country and shared pictures of herself in exotic vacation spots, relaxing after a few hard but very successful months of promoting a new millionaire client.  Brenda was exhausted and desperately wanted to work with someone who could produce results like that!

She reached out to this person online and immediately hired her, full of expectations about how things would proceed now that an expert was in charge. 

And things went well for a while.  Brenda was smart.  She required her new social media manager to keep a password spreadsheet and update it on a regular basis.  Brenda stayed in the loop about which sites her new social media guru was adding her to and Brenda maintained control of her own content.  She also met with her social media manager on a regular basis to review updates and participate in her own strategy.  Brenda was a sharp lady!

What Brenda failed to realize was that her new social media manager was signing her up for 100+ different large and small social platforms  and tools in order to give her the visibility she so desperately needed.  Unfortunately this "social media guru" didn't have the ability, expertise or bandwidth to actively participate in and build communities across these sites, so she simply put up a profile on each one and then used every conceivable tool imaginable to link accounts and monitor from afar so she wouldn't have to actively engage on these social networking sites.  Brenda knew she now had lots of different profiles.  She thought that was a good thing! Brenda was wrong!

The Horror!

Brenda came in to work one morning to find that she no longer had a LinkedIn account.  It seems that her social media manager had requested a connection with too many people who didn't know Brenda. 

Three days later Brenda was speaking with a client who casually mentioned that she had been trying to schedule an appointment with her from her Facebook page.  After all, Brenda's strategist had recommended she entice people to join her page by offering her amazing customer service right there on Facebook.  Brenda wasn't pleased to find that this client had been ignored.

Brenda was beginning to feel a bit out of control.  She was having a hard time reaching her social media manager.  She kept seeing her Facebook updates detailing her travels and exciting adventures, but Brenda couldn't seem to get a timely response to any of her questions and a phone call with this person had become almost out of the question! 

In desperation, Brenda reached out to a friend who recommended another social media firm.  A quick evaluation of her online presence showed that Brenda had multiple status updates saying exactly the same thing and going out at the same time across a variety of sites.  There were lots of questions (some months old) awaiting a response in Brenda's social media accounts.  In addition, she had months worth of private messages sitting there with no answer.  Posts were certainly going out on a regular basis but it didn't seem as though Brenda was actually talking to anyone else online.  For all her profiles and social accounts, Brenda was alone.

Brenda hired the new firm to help her take back control of her accounts.  In doing so she found that her accounts had been linked in so many ways that her social footprint was nothing more than a huge mass of confusion.  Her Blog pinged out to three different third party applications that then syndicated the blog out to a multitude of networking sites.  The issue here was that each 3rd party app was sharing the blog on many of the same sites.  Often she was posting 3-5 times with the exact same status update on multiple networking sites at the exact same time.  Her comments, @mentions and private messages were being monitored through a different third party app that came into her social media manager's gmail account.  Unfortunately that app had been shut down long ago and her social media manager didn't realize that no comments might be caused by an application issue.  She had been so busy doing other things that she hadn't been watching Brenda's accounts the way she should have.  Brenda had left a trail of people online thinking that she was ignoring them.  In addition, very little attention had been paid to the etiquette on each site and the spoken (and unspoken) rules of requesting new connections.  Brenda found she was leaving an overall poor impression on most of her networking sites.

The Fix

Brenda and her new team spent several months tracking down each individual profile, cleaning it up, closing down a few that just weren't in line with Brenda's overall goal and getting a better idea of exactly where Brenda realistically was in her social networking process.  She also spent some time apologizing to those she had been ignoring and spamming.

In addition:

1.       Brenda and her new team made some strategic decisions about how large of a presence she needed at that time in order to meet her goals.  She chose her networking sites carefully based on her target audience and goals versus her old strategy of having a presence on every platform imaginable.  This made Brenda's presence much easier to manage and much more likely to produce results.

2.       A mind map was created for Brenda's strategy so she could easily see how her content would be shared.

3.       The 3rd party syndication apps that Brenda would use were chosen carefully and mapped out so Brenda could effectively and strategically syndicate her content while maintaining her own integrity and engaging the exact audience on each networking community she was participating in. 

4.       Google analytics were set up so Brenda could see which social platforms were bringing her the most traffic.  Those were the ones she chose to spend the most time cultivating.

5.       All of these items took place with the understanding that no strategy is static.  As time went on and Brenda's situation, needs and goals changed, Brenda's strategy would evolve too.

There is no such thing as a cookie cutter social media strategy, and yet that's what many self proclaimed social media managers want to hand out.  Often they don't even realize they aren't providing the client with maximum value because they don't fully understand social media strategies themselves. It's a tough business.  Even a savvy business owner can find themselves at the mercy of someone who talks a great talk but is unable to customize and then implement a strategy for their business.

Before you hire someone, take a look at their social profiles.  Are they spamming people, have their sites been neglected, can you reach out to them via Twitter or Facebook and get a response?  

Need help evaluating your own strategy or training your team to implement a quality social media method? Contact us today!