Social Media does work. If you need proof, take a look at this very useful tool, Engagementdb for measuring companies’ engagement. It’s not always about “eyeballs”, “fans” and “friends”. Social Media is Social – which means it’s about people and not about technology. Now, there is a tool that can measure how engaged your company is with your customers. Of course, this report is concentrated on big brands. But it’s a start. What can we learn from companies like Starbucks and Dell and apply to the tourism industry? I picked my favorite 6 Best Practices for Engagement from the Engagementdb report:
- Starbucks social media team comprises of only 6 people. Dell’s social media team is only 3 people. This is a small department for the size of these companies. Starbucks obtained the highest social media score among 100 brands, as ranked by the Engagementdb report. A small staff sometimes can accomplish miracles on the social web. As a brick-and-mortar store, Starbucks and Dell came ahead of many large brands, some of them very high-tech. Once again, this proves that social media is more about engaging with your customers and less about technology. The size of your social media team does not necessarily become the most important success factor for your social media efforts.
- Understand how each social media channel works within your social media strategy. Facebook is going to provide you with a customer interaction that will be different from Twitter. Startbucks uses Facebook to create a dialogue with customers. Their Facebook page grew virally from 200,000 people to 3.5 million fans – one of the largest Facebook pages. Starbucks also discovered that for every 4 people who comment on their page, they add 3 more fans. A good indicated for viral content. Starbucks uses Twitter differently than Facebook – they use their Twitter account for customer service, to answer menu questions and deliver breaking news and contest.
- Your social media strategy needs champions from within the company to be successful. Look for people in your organization who are familiar with social media and who can become champions of your efforts. Startbucks used CEO Howard Schultz to personally launch myStarbucksidea.com.
- Understand that once you commit to social media, you are in it for the long haul. Once you have decided to open up for a dialogue with your customers you can’t shut the door. You need to allocate time and resources and commit to the engagement.
- Spread the responsibilities with other people in the company. If you are starting out on the social web you probably have a small team of people with full-time jobs. Social media becomes an additional responsibility for them. Find other people in the company who are interested in contributing with content. Make sure you have a social media policy in place to avoid potential costly mistakes. Train them how to engage on behalf of the company properly.
- Make social media part of everyone’s job. This one is my favorite and speak to the one above. If everyone spent 20 min a day engaging on social media on behalf of the company, the responsibility will no longer fall only on a few people to manage the content. A few tweets, a Facebook update, a blog post may be all you need to stay active. In addition, a different point of view sometimes may bring in refreshing perspective and spark a conversation.
These are my favorite 6 best practices from the Engagementdb report. You can read all of them here. Let me know what you think. Which ones do you think are most applicable to the tourism indsutry?
People are talking about you, your company, your brand. Do you know what they are saying?
