September 7, 2016
Clients often come to us seeking guidance on their social media strategies, and one question is always asked of us ‘What and how many channels should we be on?’
In order to answer this, we first look at their current social media presence, in the form of a social media audit. For late adopters and small brands with little social presence, the process is easy. But for early adopters and brands with multiple locations or sub-brands, the process is a little bit harder. Especially if that brand is, for example, a pub chain with multiple brick-and-mortar outlets.
As part of the audit, we scrape every social media page imaginable, to identify which channels a brand is on and whether their accounts are active or inactive. You may not be surprised to find that majority of brands have accounts they never knew existed, set up by an intern back in 2007 or a super fan that has found another passion. It is crucial that these accounts are either reclaimed, shut down or merged, for a number of reasons.
- Customers may interact with these pages, leading to complaints being or inquiries being unanswered.
- Inactive accounts may force brands to have usernames inconsistent with their branding
- Content and contact details on inactive channels can be outdated causing confusion to customers
Once a brand’s social media presence has been mapped out, the next step is to analyse the performance of each social account. All the channels can then be compared to competitor brands and against industry benchmarks. This helps identify the types of content that resonate with a brand’s audience and that of their competitors.
After a brand has a helicopter view of all its social property, it then has to realistically assess the resources it has versus the amount needed. But just because a brand has the resources to manage multiple channels, doesn’t necessarily mean it should. Brands that have too many channels run the risk of diluting their audience if not managed correctly.
The same problem can occur if the brand has too many of one type of social media channel, such as brands with multiple locations, sub-brands.
So should brands have one page for all their locations, franchises or sub-brands or lump them under one umbrella?
That question (and many more) answered in my next instalment…