How to Maximize Your Social Media Presence with Minimal Effort

It’s a reality of life that from time to time only the people who work in a company’s marketing section actually ever know what’s going with the company’s marketing plan. New thoughts get implemented with the rest of the company being none the wiser. And if your association is like many others, internal social media strategy trickled in a small at a time, seeping through the cracks, but never quite fully soaking in.

This often spells missed opportunity for in-house marketers to leverage the many channels available to them throughout the company to help them reach their goals.

I, myself, am in the beginning stages of performing a company wide analysis of potential missed opportunities in the way of social media promotion. We want to take full advantage of all the communications and channels we have available to us to let people know that we also want to connect on our Facebook, Twitter & YouTube accounts, and of course, our blog.

In this post, I’ll tell you how I plan to tackle the research and make little adjustments that can have impact on our social media exposure in the coming year.

Analyze Internal Communications

A great first step is sitting down with each of the departments in your company (and you can simply do this with individual employees if your company is smaller), to find out who they talk to and how they communicate every day.

Then brainstorm ideas on missed opportunities for directing those people to social media channels. Everyone in the company has a chance to touch someone important to your business, including:

• Sales
• Customer service
• Account management
• Technical staff
• Creative staff
• Accounting (yes, vendors are an important alliance, too)
• Executive staff

This is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Depending on how each department or individual operates, the social media promotion will fit in differently.

For example, the sales department might start directing more traffic to your company blog for more information on your business’ area of expertise, or perhaps they’ll hand select articles that your company has written on a particular problem the prospect is currently facing. This is both helpful to the prospect and the sales funnel.

On the other hand, your customer service people who handle calls all day can take those opportunities to plug any promotions or contests that your company might be having on any given social medium.
The point being, if you’re an in-house marketer, it’s important to know where these missed opportunities exist companywide, and to secure wins with minimal efforts that integrate seamlessly into the activities these employees are already performing.

Assess Outward Communications

Take stock of every device and piece of collateral (digital or print) your department creates. Then do the same for every department and/or staff member (if a smaller company). Where are your missed opportunities to promote your social media?
This includes things like:

• Print collateral
• Web pages
• Power point presentations
• Newsletters
• Business cards
• Emails
• Press releases
• Multimedia like podcasts or videos
• Client documents and deliverables
• Social media (yes, promote your various social media through your social media!)

This is just journey of your “t”s and dotting your “i”s on your company’s day-to-day communications. Then you have to ensure that each new campaign you initiate also ties the social media into it. For example, if your company is heavily involved in industry conferences or tradeshows like we are, you have to think about how to work in your social media exposure into that marketing plan.

Well, those are my quick-and-dirty tips for optimizing your company for social media promotion. I’m sure we all have missed opportunities that can be seized with little to no impact on our daily routines. What are your ideas?