Is Social Media Free?
“The best thing about social media – it’s easy and free.”
In my daily readings I ran across a blog posting by Megan Green encouraging everyone to build a Twitter account. I do not disagree at all, every company should have a Twitter profile and actively using it to monitor their brand and participate in the conversation.
I don’t mean to single Megan out, or anyone else for that matter – but there is a definite cost to social media. While Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or any other network will not charge you to create a profile there is a cost associated to monitor, evaluate and participate in social media.
There are some free tools like TweetDeck and CoTweet that allow you to easily monitor brand mentions on Twitter. More robust tools like Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics and Radian6′s / Cisions’ Social Media Dashboard require a monthly or yearly fee. But these tools also allow you to monitor more than just Twitter, they aggregate the social space for you and help you better monitor and respond to conversations. There can also be a significant investment to conduct a social media audit to decide what networks to monitor and participate in.
I believe all companies should have a social media presence, but developing a strong strategy and communication plan requires research and time. Executing those items requires a dedicated team. Understand these conversations happen daily, hourly even. It’s not something you can check once a month. While there is a cost associated with these items, one solution could be having your agency or consultant provide the needed training and documentation to execute these efforts in-house.
But be aware that to measure the effectiveness of these efforts require the proper tagging and analytics as well. And if you team is not familiar with these tools you may require an additional team member or further training.
When developing your social media team or strategy think about the following items. This social media checklist will help you determine the efforts needed to monitor, evaluate, participate and eventually expand your program.
- Have you performed the necessary research on your consumer to understand any segments or behaviors that would affect your strategy.
- Have you performed a social media audit to understand where you consumer is listening or conversing online
- How will you monitor the conversations? What channels?
- Will you monitor more than just your brand? What about the competition? What about your category?
- What benchmarks and metrics will you measure against?
- How will you evaluate the conversations taking place?
- Do you have a communications plan for participating in the conversations?
- When responding to conversations, what does your brand ambassador look like? What is their tone?
- Understand that you need to provide options within these spaces for the consumer to respond. If they feel more comfortable contacting you by phone, e-mail or a direct message on Twitter – understand this.
- How will you track these conversations and responses? Are you using Google Analytics and link tracking? What is the main destination on your Web site to send the consumer?
- And what are your next steps? How will you measure and refine your program or expand it to additional networks and social spaces?
You can certainly begin by dipping your toe in the water and that cost may be very small. But to scale the program requires an investment. And understand that these conversations will be happening whether your participate or not. Can you afford not to be engaged in the social media space?
