Almost everyone knows that friends, fans, and followers are important in social media, and maintaining a transparent, two-way communication with those followers is fundamental to increasing your social equity and climbing the social pillars.
A recent article by Social Media Examiner discusses the difference between simply engaging in social behavior and becoming a social business. In fact, most companies that engage in social media are successful in maintaining that two-way communication, but there is another challenge that is rarely discussed about social pillars. For a business to truly succeed in social media marketing, they must become a social business.
A social business is one that does more than simply converse with its followers. As the article states, “A social business deals with the internal transformation of an organization and addresses key factors such as organizational dynamics, culture, internal communications, governance, training, employee activation and much more.” Social Media Examiner goes on to describe three pillars that comprise a social business: people, governance, and technology.
The first pillar, people, deals with an organization’s most important asset, its employees. The first step in evolving into a social business is getting your internal communications network established. In order to be more than just social, you must manage your organizational dynamics and get your internal teams to communicate. Successful communication with your consumers begins inside your business.
The second pillar, governance, is simply how your organization manages the communication set up in pillar one. Training, social media guidelines and policies are imperative for organizations in order to maintain consistency. Governing laws that surround your businesses’ social media protect a company and empower its employees.
The third pillar, technology, establishes how your business will facilitate internal communication. Businesses must be willing to invest in the right channels if they want to truly be a social business. Using external tools such as Hootsuite, Sprinklr, or Radian6 can also be useful if your business deals with multiple social media accounts.
Being a social business requires much more than just social engagement. It takes understanding and participation from everyone behind the scenes, policies and governances to control how people communicate, and the proper tools to manage your social networks.
