1) Choose the Right Networks

Ask yourself these questions with these major networks in mind:

1. Which type of content do you already produce?
2. Where is your audience?
3. Where are your competitors?
4. What’s the uniqueness of the network and can you leverage it?

Consider facebook, twitter, instagram, youtube, linkedin, snapchat or viber.

2) Clarify Goals

The obvious business goal is to get new customers and engage existing ones, but how to achieve this? Take time to discuss these goals with your team or your digital agency, and write them down to get a picture of where you are and where you want to be. These factors are critical to consider when planning a content strategy.

For example If your objective is to use social media for customer care, then your content should amplify that message.

3) Develop a Content Strategy

Allow your team brainstorming sessions Or hire a Digital Marketing Agency like ads! to generate new ideas and research best-practices. Don’t forget to make a social communication calendar that includes important dates, holidays, and a publishing schedule.

Consider the questions below when developing these:

1. What’s your tone of voice? Discuss brand values and define a handful of adjectives to describe your voice how will it be communicated through your content?
2. Where will you source content? Created in-house, By Digital Marketing Agency or purchase images how often will you post & when?

4) Managing Profiles

Maybe someone in the company hastily created a Twitter profile and the account has gone idle. Create a simple social media master document and log basic details such as: profile URL, login details, who has access, date created etc. This limits surprises and ensures you have control over your social domains.

5) Cross Channel Integration

Don’t forget to tell people you’re active on social media. Begin to integrate social with other marketing channels such as the website itself, email footers, social extensions on PPC, commercials, print ads, etc.

6) Analyze Performance

It’s important to understand your competitors’ social media performance, as well as yours. Create a list of your immediate competitors and see what they’re doing on social. Competitive analytics will be crucial moving forward, as you consistently benchmark your success, stay on top of industry trends and seek inspiration.

The post 6 Steps to Create Winning Social Media Strategy appeared first on ads! digital.

Social media crisis are a reality and a risk that we all face today. It is an online situation that has, or risks having, a negative and long-term impact on your business .We’re all vulnerable to online attacks that threaten having a lasting and damaging impact on our brand’s reputation, both online and offline, and bottom-line.

Sometimes things get out of your control. Sometimes things can get a bit ugly. Posts meant to be internal go public, and others may be read as unintentionally insensitive or misleading. Most often, a real-life brand image crisis carries over onto social media, where it can catch and spread quickly. So when a crisis happens to your brand (and there’s a good chance one eventually will!), you need to know how to react.

Recently in Nepal we faced two major crisis back to back that led us to situations where we could do nothing but suffer. We faced devastating earthquake on April 2015(also known as the Gorkha earthquake) that killed over 10,000 people and injured more than 24,000. It was the most noticeably bad characteristic catastrophe to strike Nepal since the 1934 Nepal-Bihar tremor. The shake was trailed by more than 1000 post-quake tremors took after by another enormous seismic tremor (6.8) on May 12.

The consequences that we Nepalese people faced due to earthquake was not healed even by a half percent and soon our country faced another huge crisis called  the 2015 Nepal blockade which began on 23 September 2015 by our own neighbouring country India. This caused an economic and humanitarian crisis that severely affected and is still affecting Nepal and its economy. As a landlocked nation, Nepal imports all of its petroleum supplies from India. Roughly 300 fuel trucks enter from India on a normal day, but this has dwindled to a sporadic passage of 5–10 fuel trucks daily since the start of the crisis, though shipments of perishables like fruits and vegetables have generally been allowed to pass. The blockade has choked imports of not only petroleum, but also medicines and earthquake relief material. 

In this critical crisis, we,our country is suffering and there is noone here to make a change. The change what I am referring to is about an effective plan. Our country was/is not prepared to face any kind of natural calamities or blockade because the government lacks effort to implement proper plan. The old saying ‘Act in haste, repent at leisure’ is certainly very true, The old saying ‘Act in haste, repent at leisure’ is certainly very true, but with a well-organized plan, you simply will not have to repent, because everything will be fine.

As social marketing and management experts (and from being on the wrong side of a few crises ourselves), we’ve prepared 4 essential steps to getting a social media crisis under control that we implemented for our clients during the time of major crisis in Nepal. This should definitely help you understand what needs to be done during crisis.At ads! we felt the need of crisis plan right away and started working on them. We understood that a mishandled crisis can destroy your reputation , and can even end up circulating in the news. We need to make sure you have a workable plan ready for dealing with crisis situations.

1. Detect

Before you can even begin to work on an issue, you have to know that there is an issue in the first place. To effectively manage  social media presence, you have to be tuned into the chatter surrounding your brand. If you see a negative comment or a complaint posted to one of your profile pages (and especially if it has the potential to go viral), or multiple comments about the same issue, start working on it immediately.

2. Identify

Identify what led to the problem. Who was involved? What happened and when did it happen? Once you have a clear and objective view on the problem, it’s time to look into steps to fix it.

Make sure that you not only have control of the situation, but that each team in your organization is completely synched from the top, down, on how to deal with the situation and potential future crises like it.

3. Consider (The Four T’s)

Tone – What should be the tone of your response? Make sure that it aligns both with your company’s tone in general, but also with the appropriate tone demanded by the situation. If you can be lighthearted about the incident, be lighthearted. If it’s a serious issue, communicate in a serious tone.

Timeliness – How long ago did the incident happen? Make sure you’re reacting as quickly as you can while still making sure not to trip over your own feet in an effort to correct your mistake. This is why it’s so important to be efficient in how you take apart the problem and prepare your communication strategy.

Thoroughness – What networks are you covering? This isn’t like posting content; you don’t need to be everywhere, drawing even more attention to a problem you’d like to have people accept and move past. Make sure to consider how the story is spreading, and address it in the same way.

Transparency – In almost every situation, transparency is best. That means not only should your response acknowledge any mistake your brand made, but it also should show that you are trying to deal with it an honest way. This means openly broadcasting all of the steps that you are taking to fix it and make sure it doesn’t

4. Respond

Now it’s time to respond. Get your social media posts ready on all appropriate channels, then send them out. Be prepared to continually deal with further feedback – also, alert your  team to your communications strategy so that news reports only include the official positioning. It is highly useful to be using a CMS tool here, to make sure that you are controlling the conversation to the fullest extent.

Once you’ve developed a plan, make sure to circulate it within your organization.  You could even try running scenarios with your team, in order to test your preparation. With a good crisis plan in place, and the proper training, you can safely avoid any potential social media catastrophe.

Social media crises threaten us all, but with the proper preparation you can empower your company to be able to turn a social media crisis into a positive PR campaign for your brand. All it takes is a little assessing, planning and training.

After the devastating earthquake and blockade, their consequences has taught us all to be prepared with an effective plan that will help everyone in our country.  At ads! we understand how important it is to have a crisis plan in place. We believe that we should be able to formulate proper plan before the crisis strikes as when it does we are more than just ready for it.

The post 4 Things You Must Have In Your Social Media Crisis Plan appeared first on ads! digital.