Social media strategy and community building for small businesses and enterprise organizations can often differ. That’s why I recently interviewed Lissa Duty is the VP of Community Management at Advice Interactive, and speaker at the upcoming SEJ Summit in Dallas on March 31st (which we still have a few spots open for! Request an Invite Now). Her session covers social media, and I knew she’d have some key insight we could all benefit from.
The SEJ Summit conference ticket cost is being covered by our partner, Searchmetrics, which delivers enterprise SEO and content marketing analysis, recommendations, forecasting, and reporting for companies who want potential customers to find them faster.
If you aren’t in the Dallas area and won’t be able to attend that Summit, don’t lose hope! The SEJ Summit will be at five other locations this year: Chicago, London, NYC, Atlanta, and San Francisco.
Here’s Lissa’s insight and recommendations for social media strategy and community building.
1. Your SEJ Summit session is about social media strategies for enterprise. Can you tell us 3 takeaways audience members will be able to bring home from your session?
- How to Manage a Brand in Real-Time
- Owning the Social Process
- Strategies & Tools for Reputation Management
2. Many times, enterprise companies get into hot water for even the smallest social media snafu. What are your top 3 tips for putting out a fire when it comes to a mistake?
- Acknowledge it ASAP
- Accept responsibility (whether guilty or not, an apology goes along way towards forgiveness)
- Take corrective action
3. Your session is going to cover cross-department partnerships to make social media better. What departments do you think NEED to be involved in the company’s social media strategy?
All teams need to be open to communicating with the social team, sharing company news, and be willing to participate in social. This could mean being the eyes and ears at events where social isn’t, which could include providing photos, tips, notes and more so social can share, blog, etc. about the changes.
4. How is social media strategy different between enterprise and small businesses?
Enterprise strategy is more complicated because you have all the teams doing different tasks and often times they don’t communicate with each other, so you have many different people you have to go in order to get the information you need to do your job.
Small businesses has just a few people and getting to the person that you need right away is usually a more direct process.
Another major factor is getting everyone in the company, no matter small business or enterprise, to value social media or at least be wiling to contribute to the process with a Facebook Like, snapping a photo, or just simply commenting on a blog post as themselves.
5. I’ve found many of the top enterprise companies on social media do a great job of creating a community. How can other organizations do the same?
One of the best ways to create a community on social media is to be real, have personality, and communicate on social media. Don’t broadcast, but collaborate.
The way to start creating these great communities is by having company employees contributing by commenting and participating as themselves, along with getting customers and others to add value to the social space. Social media is about conversation, which will build the community.
Thanks for such a great interview, Lissa! We’d love to hear audience feedback and experiences with social media strategy in the comments below.
Remember, spots are still open for our upcoming SEJ Summit in Dallas on March 31st. The SEJ Summit will also be at these other locations later this year: Chicago, London, NYC, Atlant, and San Francisco.
Featured photo credit: Quka / Shutterstock.com
