Last quarter we began to create our social media presence. We decided to keep it simple and only focus on the Big 3 — Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn — and re-commit to our corporate blog. Seems easy enough, right? But, how do you keep things manageable when you’re a small marketing team at a start-up company?
It’s easy to get sucked down this rat hole. Shucks, it doesn’t cost anything to set up a Twitter account, Facebook fan page or LinkedIn profile. The rub is that you need time and content — and lots of it — to feed the social media beast.
So, how did we tackle this challenge? We identified 5 areas that we would broadcast via social media:
- Blog posts: Really the foundation of all of our social media activity, and the place where we could deliver the meatiest content.
- Events: All of our webinars and trade show participation now get a shout-out.
- Press releases: We now tweet our press releases and just had nice success with a recent customer win that got good coverage from the Twitterverse.
- News coverage: If we find news articles mentioning our company tweeted, we’ll re-tweet. Otherwise, we’ll create a new tweet.
- Case studies: Customer news is always good to share.
While we want the blog to be the foundation of our social media activity (using Facebook and Twitter to drive activity back to the content), we discovered that it was difficult to get consistent content out of the 3 bloggers we had identified within the company. And as a small company, we don’t really have tons of news to share, so we found it hard to get the volume of activity we were hoping for.
To compensate for the lack of volume, we listened closely to what was being said and re-tweeted items that we thought were particularly useful, or that showed some thought leadership. This helped us diffuse some of our broadcasting — us only talking about our company. We also discovered that there is currently a minimal amount of interaction happening with tweeps following the keywords that are important to our business, so we’re not able to be as interactive as we would like just yet. Hopefully, that will change in the coming months.
So, what else did we learn from dipping our toe in the social waters? That it is really tough to measure the impact of these activities. In an upcoming post, I’ll share what we’ve learned so far from a measurement perspective.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear about your experiences with launching social media at your company.
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