We're almost ready to dive in and start our social media marketing efforts. So far, you've learned how to prepare by setting goals, determining the associated KPIs, defining your target audience, and mapping the customer journey and you have a good sense of what social media landscape looks like. There's one last important step a marketer needs to take and that's deciding which social media platforms matter to achieve your marketing goals. You may be part of a business that has already established its social media presence and they may have already chosen the channels they are active in, but you could also be the one who needs to make that choice. In any case, it's important to know what you should think about before deciding on the social media channels where you will interact with your customers. By the end of this video, you'll know what to keep in mind as you make this decision. First, let's take a look at this interview. My name is Penney Berryman and I manage social media for IBM Watson Health. IBM Watson Health is an essential data analytics and technology partner for the health industry. Watson is artificial intelligence, deep learning, learning to learn, and great capacity to mine data and make sense of it faster than humans ever can. IBM and the Watson Health Team are an amazing place to work. There's opportunity for innovation, ideas, talent, and growth that I thought maybe only existed in words but actually exists in culture. My job on a day to day basis involves three main components. The first one is social listening, The second one is the preparation of posts and the third one is the analytics of what we've done. Starting with the top one, social listening means that I'm going online to the three main channels I manage, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter and I'm looking at thought leaders. I'm looking at trends and hashtags. I'm understanding what's happening on that platform, what people are talking about because that's going to matter for the second part of my job, which is preparing the posts. I want to make sure that when I'm writing the posts and I'm working with the stakeholders that we're putting content out that makes sense for the audiences on those platforms. For preparing the posts, I'm going to work with product marketers who want to talk about a product. I'm going to work with the visual designers to come up with a graphic for the social post and I'm going to work with our legal team to make sure that as a stakeholder, we are on-brand as well as in a health setting, there are certain types of content we put out that we have to make sure we're aligning on. Those three partners are the biggest part of the preparation stage. Visual designers, the content writers, and then, of course, our legal team as the stakeholder. Part of my job in that writing stage and preparing to post it is applying the social lens. We know that social has a tone to it. If you're on LinkedIn, it's a little more businessy. You see fewer pictures of dogs and vacations. If you're on Twitter, it's like a microwave. If it's fast, it's quick, people are responding, it's casual, lots of emoticons. So, understanding the language and making sure that when we're going out on those platforms that we're matching it. We get our message out, but in the right ways and then the third part of my job is analytics. It's great to have wonderful content that looks good that people like it on the platforms but at the end of the day, we still have to prove that social has value and so in my job, I use several different platforms to look at how many people are engaging, how many people are clicking. When they're clicking, where are they going from there? Are they going to our website? Are they registering for the webinar that we want them to? Are they staying around long enough to do a second action on our website? Social really is the analytics side. It's not always clear cut what the value of it is. Part of the value for social is the conversation. It's called social media for a reason and so it can be hard to say the value of this post, they got 200 likes is that 200 people like us more but really you're also building relationships. You are building your brand, so it does matter but you also have to be able to provide some of those harder numbers, which is this many people came to the website, this many people registered from the webinar because they clicked on our social posts. The analytics is an important piece, perhaps a little bit harder than just the writing and the fun part but it's equally as valuable and makes the case for why social is an important channel. One piece of the analytics that is growing in importance is the customer service piece. This is a metric or one of the ways of measuring success on social. That if you have a complaint and someone names your brand, as a brand you want to get on that. You want to be able to respond, you want to be timely. If someone has a question about something you've posted, you want to respond to it and so setting up the right systems and knowing how quickly you're going to respond to questions and complaints and how quickly you're going to respond when someone mentions your brand in a positive way, is also an important measurement that we look at. Social media marketing is all about interacting and participating in a community. You can find that community on different platforms but as you probably gathered from watching our interview, being active on social media takes time and effort. Not only do you need to create a content to post in a different channel where you're active, you should also respond to questions, interact with people on the platform and try to be visible when there are trending topics related to your business or product. All of that takes time and effort. You can be active on every platform. It's better to focus on a few social media platforms and concentrate your time and effort on participating there, rather than trying to cover all platforms and not having enough time to really interact with customers on each one of them. Before you get started, evaluate your resources and keep in mind that it's hard for one person to manage a vibrant social following on more than two or three platforms. Time and resources will often force us to choose a few social media platforms to be active on, so you need to make that choice wisely. In the next video, we will help you with tips on how to select the social media platforms that best suit your marketing goals.
