Digital Minds Forum

This post also appears on the My Marketing Manager Blog

A social media marketing policy isn’t just about keeping up with the latest fad in marketing; it’s about giving real and measurable business benefits. So here are my top 5 business benefits from implementing a social media marketing policy.

Increases your online presence

Social media marketing will help improve your search engine rankings by providing more platforms for your content to be found. Don’t forget YouTube is the 2^nd largest search engine and combined with other channels and effective keyword use, search engine rankings have only one way to go…up!

Engage more effectively with stakeholders

Stakeholder engagement with social media can be targeted and useful insight tool to test sentiment and opinion. New stakeholders and social media influencers (specifically in the social media landscape) can be identified and actively targeted with communications for on-going engagement. In doing so, timely more up to date information can be gleaned through the 2 way channel of communication. In other words, you will hear directly from your stakeholder’s information you may have struggled to obtain.

And don’t forget the theory of 6 degrees of separation, social media marketing is set to reduce the degrees and will help use your stakeholder’s network more effectively.

Protect your brand

If you do not register your brand names on social media marketing channels you can be certain someone else will. Even if you do not want to be active on a particular channel it’s worth registering your organisation and other trade names to protect your names.

And, if you do find there are ‘fake’ or ‘anti’ voices against your brand, being active on social media will mean that you have an increased online presence and so help to reduce the effectiveness of those rogue accounts.

Reviewing your brand online footprint is a good idea before implementing a social media policy. Reviewing your brand online footprint is a good idea before implementing a social media policy, you can also use free tools such as namechk to help in the process.

Online brand ambassadors

All the big brands have realised the importance of using brand ambassadors within their social media channels. For example, Ford now actively invites significant influential bloggers to media events and has seeked out brand ambassadors within communities to work and engage on their campaigns.

But, the true brand ambassadors are as always, your staff. Giving employees the tools and capabilities to engage in social media on your organisation’s behalf is a power way of helping to achieve 2 objectives – engaging, motivating and empowering your employees and communicating your brand values through brand ambassadors using social media marketing.

Making sure you have good guidelines combined with training will ensure the success of your social media policy.

Crisis communications tool

In the past, I heard much talk about using a social media policy for crisis communications. Great idea, but in many cases there can be a major pitfall. What is the point of creating a crisis communications policy that includes the use of social media, if you have not actively engaged with your stakeholders and therefore you’ll simply not have the appropriate reach to ensure success?

KLM is an interesting case with their social media for marketing journey starting during a crisis. They found that followers naturally came to their channels during the Icelandic Volcanic eruption and air traffic problems.  Due to the problems at airports and influx of people trying to contact the airline, travellers began to tweet/Facebook KLM. So for five days during the crisis, they set up a 24/7 customer service on Facebook/twitter. KLM now have 40 dedicated employees dedicated to their social media hub, having been plunged into social media marketing via a crisis. KLM have embraced it ever since.

Convinced now it’s not a fad? So to summarise, the sooner you get implementing a social media marketing policy, the sooner you get realising those top 5 business benefits.

Claire Savage is a marketing consultant, corporate marketing trainer and CIM marketing tutor.

The Social Media Benchmark launch is on 15 February, Bloomberg London and we are really looking forward to hearing what they’ve  uncovered in the first wave of the Social Media Benchmark.

Your chance to put your questions directly to our panel of experts – senior representatives from LinkedIn, YouTube and the former global VP mobile at Skype.

Find out more on http://www.smbenchmark.com/