Like a diamond, social media marketing strategy revolves around 4Cs – Care, Content, Campaigns & Collaboration.

1. Care –

Your customer care hotline is simply not enough for the digital age. People turn to social media to seek information or assistant.

The key is to respond properly and timely. First, set up standard of procedure of handling customer enquiry/complaints.  Have you set up within what time customer enquiry needed to be responded to? Do you have a FAQ ready to answer questions? Have you set up a go-to list for questions what you need to seek outside of your department? How do you handle a complaint? What investigation needs to be done before. Of course, everyone knows is that you needs to take the complaint offline. Talk to the customer directly instead of arguing online. And above all, have a crisis plan ready. When do things need to be escalated? Crisis Plan! 

Instead of passively waiting for customers/potential customer to reach out to you, you have to be proactive – look out there. Constant monitoring and an alert system is the key. There are a lot of tools out there to help you monitor trending topics or people talking about your brand, product or services. 

Set up your own sentiment scores. Work with your agency or your PR team. This is essential if you are selling service. You want to know if people like you or not.  Also, when you launch a campaign. Monitor the before and after number of people are talking about you and the sentiment score will also give you some insights on how successful your campaign is.

2. Content –

Cliché – content is king. It’s true though. Managing your brand’s content is not the same as writing your personal journal. Define your own content strategy. What content pillars can

1)   tell your brand story

2)   appeal to your fans and make them want more

Don’t ever post something because you have to. Don’t think as a brand marketers. Think as a fan. What’s this in for me? Will I like this content? Will I share with my friends? Seriously, I don’t really care where you have stores.  

Tell me the right thing at the right time at the right frequency. Don’t know what to do? Test it out. Define when is the best time of the day/week to post, how many times you post and what kinds of content actually gain most traction. Fine tune your strategy as your testing goes.

3. Campaigns

It’s time to amplify your efforts.  Campaigns are here to help you gain more attention than the regular posting.

Remember you have different audience and where you are in terms of social also determines what kind of campaigns you need.

If your community is small, sweepstake might be the way for you the gain the first batch of fans.

Photo contest can be a good way to motivate your fans to connect emotionally with your brand. What’s good about it? You don’t need as much translation work to determine who the winner is.

Design your campaigns based on your brand essence and what group of your fans you are appealing you.  You need different campaigns for the mass, your new fans, your normal fans and your hardcore fans.

4. Collaboration

You can do things on your own but by partnering with the right gangs, you’ll be there faster and more successful.  You want to leverage on other’s influence and strengthen your own branding or appeal to a new group of audience.  Media, bloggers, or KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) are your friends. What can they do? They tell a better story. Think really good and hard on how you collaborate with them.  Think of a win-win solution. It’s a passé for you to simply pay them to say something you want.  Identify the potential parties you want to partner with and how you can partner with them. 

After all, our focus is the Big C – Community. To build up a healthy community that supports your brand like sport fans is a help you convey your brand message and support you when things get rough. 

Got ideas about social media marketing? Share!