Best Social Media Marketing Practices for 2019 to Fight Competition

social media in the enterprise is of crucial importance but most brands I hate to say are not doing it well. In the enterprise world in b2b tech from some big companies like Oracle and Intel and others through startups and a few years ago. I struck out as an independent to take my personal obsession with social and digital to blue chip clients in the enterprise and really never look back.

so when we talk about social media strategy why is it so important for the enterprise today well increasingly social and digital is where your customers live and in this world of digital marketing you want to meet customers and partners and journalists and analysts where they are and in this attention driven economy they are increasingly on social media

so it’s about engagement with clients and prospects and customers in a place where there’s increasingly spending the majority of their time and that leads us to social media. what are the challenges that brands face when they’re trying to do social media in the right way people like engaging with people and brands come off as trying to add sort of interlopers in this the social media and have a tough time being genuine have a tough time coming off as something else but sales and pushing themselves and generally find themselves lost in the noise there are a lot of big brands throwing a lot of money at social and digital and it’s very hard to stand out to get noticed and to find genuine engagement in this landscape these days and so those are among just a few of the as they face what is the key do you think towards to building an effective social media strategy.

Well content is the first step having compelling and interesting and regular content that catches the attention in a really meaningful way and I think so it’s all starts with the message and the content and it also starts with community social isn’t about you know putting press releases on the internet it’s about building a community of engaged customers, followers employees, and management and it’s really hard to nurture and grow a community and increasingly those communities are growing around social media and so it’s really important for customers not only to build community on social media but to nurture that community and to participate in what are hundreds of communities across the digital landscape and so it’s a little overwhelming frankly not just for individuals but for brands participating in community building that community is that the heart of social media strategy or is it something or social media strategy.

Apart from that community building and advocacy developer relations if you’re in that space is increasingly an important component but it’s a strategy that begins from the top down and meets the grassroots coming up so it’s no longer the domain of marketing communications or PR but for brands it means leveraging and energizing the entire company and its supply chain and its leadership and its management as investors and all of the various stakeholders that are out there increasingly visible and active on social so let’s say a multi-pronged strategy and to get it right or to do it well you have to have all those spokes of the wheel in alignment. Through in order to have that positive outcome well a more recent example is a tea business which of course is a very old brand went back to the invention of the telephone literally hundred years ago and of course a tea business is a gigantic brand a ton of success a ton of visibility but even for big brands like a tea business it’s not enough simply to focus on paid media and paid social what’s really required is to leverage an audience engaged audience around their events around topics and themes and keywords like IOT and 5g and health technology that are interesting and leveraged channels that extend their reach beyond typical advertising and marketing and social and these digital platforms are tremendous enablers to multiply reach to drive visibility of engagement and to reach those journalists and analysts and influencers and prospects and partners that are increasingly social as well. so by working on social and digital in a meaningful way internally and then even externally with influencers like myself they’re able to drive visibility engagement impressions it you know 10X what they weren’t doing otherwise so I think that’s a trend at the you know with big brands you’ll see and even smaller brands that maybe aren’t getting their fair share of engagement and visibility are turning to social because it’s a great guerilla marketing tool or tactic to leverage for very short money visibility and insight and opportunity and digital inside a brand like that who is the corporate or the executive sponsor that’s behind the broader strategy what’s interesting in the past you would have seen obviously marketing take ownership and marketing communications take ownership of that activity but I think that’s extending into this new area of influencer relations.