subject: Creating Goals For Social Media Management [print this page] It is important to understand and decide what the goals are for any social media management campaign. Most people involved in social media, including insurance social media, still don't have an idea of what they want to accomplish with their brand's community management efforts. It's pretty hard to be effective without some agreement of what is the desired result.
Here are a few goals to consider as part of what a successful social media management strategy could be:
Enhancing Awareness
Improving Public Perception
Enhancing Customer Service/Support
Creating Advocates
Collecting Analysis and Feedback
By enhancing awareness, a company is spreading the word to potential customers, while staying fresh in the mind of existingcustomers and anyoneelse who might influence existing and potential users.
Strong positive PR helps build brand loyalty. Whencustomers and non-customers alikethink and feel good about a brand, they are more likely to notice the positive aspect, which then translates into better word-of-mouth.
Listen to Whats Being Said & Respond
More and more, customerswith problems or questions dont always follow traditional routes of airing grievances orresolving issues. Instead, they are engaging in online and social media communities to spread the word and ask for help or seek solutions.Good community management provides enhanced customer service and support by answering users questions and directing themdown avenuesto resolve any problems or issues.
While strong brand advocates occasionally surface on their own, successful community management requires discovering, identifying, and nurturing brand advocates and key influencers.
Information on how existing or potentialcustomers feel about a productisextremely important. The ability to create and identify opportunities to improve an existing product, or understanding successful enhancementsfor future products,can generate the desired results.
By knowing what a community says they want, extracting what theyreallywant, and understanding what they dislike or dont want, helps to increase adoption, extend an existing products life, or refine design and feature sets to make new products more successful.
Educate Existing and Potential Users
When users learn what a product does, how to make the most out of a product, or even how the product is created, they tend to be much more engaged. This requires making sure, through educating existing and potential customers, that they know what the product is for or how to how to effectively utilize it.
Drive Acquisition
Perhaps the biggestgoal is to increase acquisition. Depending on the type of business, the goal is to have more people purchase or use the product. Getting people using the product more often and more organizations considering the product to be their standard stimulates growth as well.
Identifying what is important to clients can help to start creating a goal-oriented Community management strategy that allows a business owner to measure effectiveness as well as success.
