Social Media: One and Done or the More the Merrier?

Too many eggs in one social media basket? Not a good thing! With so many social possibilities out there, and so many different marketing and communications needs to be met (even within the same company!), there is simply no way adopting one platform as a sole means of social interaction with customers is the best option for a company or organization. In a recent article from Mashable.com, Brian Solis explains that organizations must lay the groundwork for proper social media engagement by first discovering their relevant communities by observing “the choices, challenges, impressions and wants of the people within each network” (2010). The means by which one segment of customers or potential customers interacts with a brand is not necessarily uniform across the entire customer base. Once an organization identifies a relevant consumer, the next step is identifying the best way to reach and converse with that audience – there’s simply no one easy way to do that. Additionally, not engaging on a variety of social networks could, figuratively speaking, leave money on the table, since pockets of target audiences may be found across dozens of digital and offline social networks.

So how does a company decide which social networks to engage with? Michael Greenberg explains that, “very few companies either have the scale to support social properly or the understanding to really make it work (2009). So if resources are tight and skills are lacking, why bother trying to engage on multiple networks? I think the answer boils down to conversations, and where a brand is most likely to have the most meaningful of them. While Greenberg is correct in his assumption that most organizations lac the time and skills to do every social thing well, he does offer an excellent solution: “Developing the content necessary to drive social and other content marketing initiatives is just an extension of that marketing calendar. If you establish a cadence, say, of two new content pieces per month, these can just get inserted into the calendar. It’s a little extra work, but I will bet that most e-commerce marketers, if they compare the time spent in a given month trying to figure out what to tweet or to post on their corporate Facebook page, will find the total time spent would likely be equivalent. And the quality of output and the quality of results would be much better” (2009). Basically, we’re all “doing marketing” anyway, so translating those materials into usable content across a variety of channels shouldn’t be as bad as we might think. So, step one in tackling more than one social media network well is to translate marketing into usable content.

The next vital piece of the social media puzzle then becomes taking the content and instigating conversation with it. What good is content if no one is talking about it? Catherine Novak explains, “Content without conversation is just broadcasting, or just advertising. It goes to the listener/reader/viewer/visitor…and stops there. If the sender is lucky, it may lodge as a piece of information in the receiver’s consciousness, and they may act on it someday. If the sender is luckier, or perhaps more engaging, it may be something that the receiver wants to talk about. And then the message gets a whole new burst of energy. That happens because we humans like to communicate with each other” (2010). Here is where it is vital to have more than one outlet to start the conversation with potential customers, advocates and fans.

Take Special Olympics New Jersey as an example. The organization has hundreds of sports competition events year round, but they also provide free health screenings, leadership opportunities, and advocacy while simultaneously hosting fundraising events and campaigns to support it all. That’s a LOT of potential content and conversation. If SONJ relied completely on Facebook, for example, to carry on the conversations about all of these things all the time, the audience there would become diluted, annoyed and irrelevant: the people who care about the Polar Plunge aren’t necessarily the same people who care about the free medical screenings, who aren’t necessarily the same people who have a child in the program. Conversations with each of these audiences may have more impact and more relevance across very different social media channels.

Parents of SONJ athletes may have better interactions with the brand (and each other!) through SONJ’s private “locker room” portal, which allows them to share stories and concerns and receive quick feedback from SONJ leadership. 

Source: www.specialolympics.org/share

Polar Plungers, on the other hand, carry on conversations with event organizers right on the Facebook ads. Not only are the ads being served to a relevant audience, they allow SONJ to talk directly with the people who are planning to take the Plunge. An organic post on the SONJ page might reach a few thousand people at most, but the level of engagement is not nearly as prolific as when the ad is offered as a conversation piece to a more relevant audience. 

 

And what about runners of SONJ’s Lincoln Tunnel Challenge? They converse more readily with the brand on Instagram, where following hashtags and photos of the event is super simple. The #ltc5k hashtag got several hundred tags throughout the event weekend, and SONJ was able to congratulate participants directly, and remind them how important their fundraising dollars would become!

Source: Screenshot from http://iconosquare.com/tag/ltc5k

Finally, general “fans” of SONJ tend to prefer conversing with the brand over powerful images and moments of triumph, organically shared on Facebook and Twitter. The audiences there tend to use the SONJ Facebook page and Twitter feeds as places to see and comment on the core of what Special Olympics is all about. A lot of the “extras” SONJ provides (like the special events and programs) don’t do as well on the organic pages since the audiences tend to be much more general fans of the movement.

Source: www.facebook.com/SONewJersey

At the end of the day, SONJ only has one staff person completely dedicated to social media.  The communications department must therefore gather content from the organization as a whole and then translate it across multiple platforms in order to reach the most relevant audiences for each conversation. Like almost any company, SONJ would not be as successful with their social media strategy – and therefore sales, engagement, participation and registrations – if they were to rely on one network only.