Every marketer is aware that social media doesn’t produce overnight achievements. An influential brand post is more often the result of careful planning and execution than of chance. The companies that succeed at it have worked hard to develop a high level of social media maturity.
That’s wonderful news, too.
It’s far easier to regulate effort than luck. Any brand may work hard enough to establish a social media presence that generates buzz. All you need is commitment, time, and resources.
1. What is social media maturity?
The sophistication of a company’s social media policies, procedures, and technology determines its level of social media maturity. Knowing where you stand on the social media maturity spectrum helps businesses find areas where they can grow, especially in strategic areas like investments, workflows, and strategy.
In order to attain a higher degree of social maturity, one must recognize and address obstacles and make the appropriate investments in infrastructure and technologies. And train stakeholders in marketing and other fields on how to use social media in their jobs.
2. Why does maturity on social media matter?
Compared to other marketing channels, social media moves more quickly. Sometimes, in less than a few hours, a social trend can start significant debates that offer unmatched insights into consumer mood.
The ability of a corporation to respond to these discussions depends on how mature its social media marketing strategy is. It will be simpler to act with purpose and dexterity when the moment comes if your approach is more refined.
3. The components of mature social media use
Consider the social media presence of your company as a garden bed. Developing your garden from a little piece of ground to a flourishing backyard food store requires proficiency in the three essential areas: habit, consistency, and expertise.
1. Investment
This also applies to your social media plan. Company executives must devote time and resources to building a staff that is representative of the diverse requirements of contemporary social media management.
The following are important investment areas to think about:
- Team growth: As the field gets more specialized due to content network and format divisions as well as paid and organic initiatives, social media careers are continuing to rise. Establishing flexible teams that cater to your brand’s distinctive features is essential for achieving success on social media.
- Leadership: Managerial and executive leaders must devote time to comprehending and supporting their companies’ social media strategies. Their involvement and contributions established the organization’s social-first culture.
- Budget: A company’s social media strategy is a collaborative effort that benefits multiple teams. Nevertheless, funds for social media should come from a variety of cost centers inside brands or business divisions.
- Software: By expediting insights and streamlining workflows, a centralized social media management solution will help you reclaim the time you need to devote to these other crucial areas.
- Collaboration: Brand strategy, product development, customer interaction techniques, and other areas can all benefit from social media insights. The first step in realizing these advantages is to commit to cross-functional cooperation.
- Education: In order for stakeholders outside of marketing to really comprehend how these insights can enhance their roles, they must be taught about social data uses outside of marketing.
2. Process
Certain plants require daily care. You can leave others alone for a few days or weeks at a time. An astute gardener will establish a set of practices that ensure the best possible results for each seed they plant in their bed.
And that’s the process, my friends.
Teams that have robust processes are better able to manage their time. This entails developing routines for social media teams that scale reporting, engagement, and posting.
While native scheduling and engagement can be optimized, a comprehensive social media management solution will yield the greatest productivity gains. With the aid of intelligent, AI-powered technology, you can reclaim your time and use it for initiatives that advance society.
3. Strategy
Consider your social media plan as the design of your garden bed and the seeding schedule. You most likely already know from research or experience that it’s not a good idea to grow strawberries in the dead of winter under a shade tree.
Similar to this, data analysis and research might influence social media choices.
Both are data-backed and business-oriented, supporting a strategic social presence. An organization’s planning frameworks ought to be proactive and ingrained.
A data-driven approach to strategic planning offers insights into upcoming trends and issues and helps connect effort to impact. These are the essential skills for raising the social media maturity of your company.
4. The stages of social media maturity
Social maturity can be divided into three main stages: mastery, evolution, and emerging. You can start thinking about the following steps for growth once you’ve determined which stage most accurately characterizes your business.
1. Emerging
Individuals or divided departments using social media with little to no management oversight and without a comprehensive, all-encompassing plan in place are part of the nascent stage of social maturity.
Basic content publication and audience interaction are included in this level. Businesses at this level could find it difficult to plan and carry out social media strategy and to show a return on investment.
In order to get to the progressive phase of social media maturity, emerging-level organizations ought to:
- Identify a key stakeholder who will serve as a connection between social practitioners and senior management, overseeing social efforts and coordinating individuals and teams.
- Set precise goals for your business in relation to social media, and create comprehensive plans of action to help you achieve them.
- Establish social media policies for your business that address often-asked questions and issues, such as who is responsible for what content is published and when they should respond.
- Inform every department about the company’s social media strategy and involve the right people in attempts to connect social media to broader marketing and customer service campaigns.
- Give teams the tools, resources, and training they need to accomplish their goals by teaching them how to utilize social media platforms in a way that supports company goals.
- Choose the social media indicators that matter for business performance, then compare them to rivals’ and industry norms to make sure relevant information is regularly collected and examined.
- Take into consideration implementing a platform that unifies publishing and engagement efforts across networks into one area.
2. Evolving
Companies that have made headway in coordinating and bolstering social strategy across departments and are now concentrating on scalability, integration, and optimization are said to be in the “evolving” stage of social maturity. This stage is distinguished by community management, focused social campaigns, and the company-wide implementation of social insights.
Businesses at the evolving level should do the following to advance to the mastery stage:
- Put more emphasis on social intelligence by tracking online trends, conversations, and sentiment in addition to typical social metrics and demographic information.
- Utilize insights from social data to guide more extensive marketing campaigns as well as efforts to improve products, services, and brands.
- Develop connections with social media influencers and content producers by implementing initiatives that foster natural curiosity, confidence, and allegiance.
- Utilize user-generated content to advance consumer advocacy.
- Invest in the instruments required to ascertain how social media affects the financial results of social media advertising as well as bottom-line KPIs like sales leads and purchases.
- Enable seasoned social media users to collaborate across teams and provide regular training sessions so they may exchange best practices, advice, and information.
- By providing staff members with social advocacy tools and initiatives, you may increase brand awareness and social selling.
- Make sure that social workflows and processes are correctly integrated with current technology and systems.
- Improve social media workflow performance with automated elements like chatbots.
3. Mastering
“Mastering” has a purpose as a verb. Maintaining it takes constant dedication. Digital transformation is not a task for the checkbox. It’s a dynamic landscape that demands ongoing innovation. In order to maintain the advancement of a superior social media strategy, companies need to:
- Give employee contributions to procedures, workflows, and strategies top priority, along with social innovation.
- Keep abreast of new developments in social media channels, capabilities, and use cases.
- Make strategic use of social business intelligence, and keep testing and refining performance assessment models.
- Gather and evaluate advanced metrics, such as market movement, user sentiment, and trending conversations, that go beyond basic business concerns.
- On novel social media use cases, take measured chances.
- Make the most of the social media management tools available.
- Make ongoing training and education a priority for your business.
- Anticipate shifts in social media usage in advance to remain ahead of the curve, increase productivity, and reap the most rewards.
- Recognize that social optimization is a continuous process that will never end and that it requires constant, unwavering attention.
