It’s hard to believe that despite the life cycle of social media being only in its infancy, it has revolutionized our personal and professional lives so profoundly. Organizations have finally begun to recognize the importance of building a business platform that can seamlessly amalgamate the interests of employees and customers. Companies are branching out via social media tools such as blogs, forums, viral videos, Facebook contests, etc. that allows customers to see the dynamic personalities driving corporate entities.
Linear processes and conventional marketing models are rusted chains clinging to your organization’s arms, preventing it from reaching its true potential. In order to do so, bold and brilliant leaders who are willing to embrace social media must step up to the mantle and overhaul outdated business models to take your organization to new levels.
Here are 5 essential tips to follow to become a truly successful social media leader:
1. Develop Content People Care About
People like cats – true. People like cats enough to associate business awesomeness with the ability of your cat to do backflips – false.
People want to see authenticity from a business, not how good it is with felines. With the billions of videos, images and articles shared around the social web, as an executive you need to create content that people actually care about.
This is why smart executives realize that the authentic engagement of millions of viewers is directly dependant on the creativity and edginess you put into your content. This kind of creativity could be as simple as producing a weekly webinar of what you learned throughout the week, or an interview with an employee, or a discussion with a client. Engagement with and insight into your organization gives your company a personality that resonates with us regular folk.
2. Exercising Distribution Competence
A piece of content is only as amazing as its reach. No matter how amazing your content is, if no one ever sees it, it’s ultimately worthless. Sad but true. The true success your social media efforts are directly proportional to your ability to leverage your audience and promote your content.
As a leader, you must identify the key social networking influencers and evangelists in your niche and get them to blog and comment on your content. This will create a magnetic aura around your brand that will attract throngs of curious users.
3. Promoting Social Media Awareness
Leaders must be willing to play the role of a tutor to promote social media literacy in an organization. Hosting workshops and reverse mentoring programs for social media awareness will help employees better understand the importance of web 2.0 and lead to better online campaign strategies and internal evangelists of your organization.
Assigning additional positions to support the flow of networked communication such as content curators, network analysts, community administrators, etc. is a great initiative to effectively harness the power of social media.
4. Reconfiguring Your Organizational Infrastructure
As a leader, molding your company’s workflow infrastructure in a way to integrate vertical accountability and transparency with horizontal networking is a key challenge.
Valuing the expertise and feedback of your customers and employees and addressing their concerns will create a sense of collective responsibility for the state of your business.
5. Staying On Top of the Game
A strong leader must be well-versed in all the aspects of social media and consistently track the latest cutting-edge social media tools in the market.
As an executive, you are busy, and likely don’t have time to keep fully up to date with the constant changes in the social sphere. But you have employees. And some of them will have time. Even getting an employee to spend an hour a week or month on social media research could mean the difference between success and failure of your social strategy.
Social media is no longer about teenagers making status posts about what they had for dinner. It has evolved into a quintessential component of every organizations business development strategy. And the most successful organizations are those who see social input straight from the top.
Input for this post was provided by Rand Group – a Houston, Texas based Microsoft business solutions provider for Microsoft Dynamics NAV, GP and SharePoint.
Why Your Social Media Revolution Should Come from the Top
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