Social Media demands engagement from many different departments

“Large enterprises lack the proper resources to manage their social media presence” As large enterprises mostly work with several departments all over the world, it’s easy to get sidetracked in the maze of different teams, timezones, regulations, and cultures. Too few companies actually involve all departments. Instead they work towards their own, independent goals with departments working in silos. First and foremost, in order to engage in realtime on social media, large enterprises need to have a well structured team in place with easy-to-use social media workflows at their disposal. That way, companies social media marketing plan template are able to effectively manage a brand’s global social media presence from a multitude of local departments. Large enterprises simply fail to align teams and departments throughout the company. As customers demand consistency across all social media channels and touchpoints (in-store, telephone, chat, etc.) brands need to be able to provide their customers with the same, consistent customer experience. For example, brands should service their customers at the right time of the day. They need insights into when their community is active because this is the moment they need to be there for them. There are two separate marketing teams at General Mills: the brand team and the consumer relations, social media engagement team. Gorrochotegui heads up the engagement team. “[The brand team's] job is to build and create the community. Our job is to interact with the community,” he says. So with tools from social media platform Spredfast, Gorrochotegui social media marketing world and his team set out to organize their social interactions with customers and engage in genuine, responsive conversations. He says, with new tools social marketers at General Mills are able to create one seamless conversation with each customer, humanize interactions, respond to concerns or compliments, and most important pull insights from each conversation. “I think it's fair to say that it's not as much about the problems as it is about the insights that come from those conversations,” Gorrochotegui continues. “For example, we oversee Toaster Strudel, and for some time now, we've been seeing customers talk about how they don't think there's enough frosting in the little packet that comes with the Toaster Strudels. So that's an insight that we gained from social.”

General Mills Discovers Shoppers' True Demands— From Social Media

One of the best ways to get to know a person is to have a genuine conversation. And marketers at consumer foods giant General Mills say it's those authentic conversations with their customers that are teaching them how to do business better than ever. “Our conversations with customers are very reactive. And what those convos do for us is maintain that affinity for the brand, for the product, for the flavor,” says Fred Gorrochotegui, senior social media strategist at General Mills. “Nowadays, you have to address problems—immediately,” he says. “If we don't do that, we lose control of the brand. Even though wesocial media marketing tips can't guarantee that every product will be perfect, we can promise that if [customers] have an issue—and they call us out on it—we'll do what's right.” Gorrochotegui says, however, that the sheer number of brands in the General Mills family and enormous amount of customers made it hard to organize—or even recognize—the conversations about the myriad properties. The company owns nearly 90 leading brands in the United States alone and numerous others across the world, including Betty Crocker, Cheerios, Nature Valley, Pillsbury, Progresso, and Yoplait. “There was no order,” Gorrochotegui explains. He says that his five-person team handles 32 General Mills properties social media marketing tools on social media—but was without an organized system of response or specific ways to create or enter conversations. “Just imagine. We didn't just have to deal with our 32 different properties, but 64 separate accounts—basically a Facebook and Twitter account for each of the properties,” Gorrochotegui says. “We're talking about remembering passwords, remembering IDs. We couldn't really tell what the last person [at General Mills] did. We couldn't even tell who posted a response.” Gorrochotegui says his team simply couldn't grow that way.

Social Media Landscape Demands New Expertise, Different Strategies

By the time the average credit union CEO is comfortable with one form of social media, it's likely the young people the CU is seeking to attract has moved on to a new one. As the social media landscape continues to evolve, Credit Union Journal talked with experts about where the new opportunities lie, which sites may already be withering on the vine and strategies for leveraging these sites. Now, a big headache for consumers could be a huge opportunity for CUs. As consumers continue to see cards reissued due to data breaches and the upcoming EMV liability shift, one analyst suggested CUs use social media to help marketing social media members understand why they keep getting new plastic in the mail. "From a content perspective it really opens up a unique opportunity for credit unions where these bigger banks seem to be more vulnerable to security breaches," said Nichole Kelly, CEO at Social Media Explorer. "This might be a good time to start talking about the security of your debit card and how credit unions are protecting [members from breaches] and not replacing your card every month because something happened completely unrelated to your account." But regardless of the message, CUs should accept that using social media costs money. "Most credit unions need to be jumping more fully into the ad-support realm of their social media, and I think you're going to find that on all the different platforms," Meredith Olmstead, a social media marketing consultant and founding partner at Social Stairway told CU Journal. "We've seen Twitter now open up, and we're seeing a lot more promotions benefits of social media marketing from credit unions and their affiliates on Twitter and of course on Facebook." That's part of a larger trend, continued Olmstead, as institutions gradually redirect marketing dollars away from traditional outlets to online platforms "and then try to figure out how to bring all of those fans and followers to their owned media — their blogs, their websites — and how to turn them into leads and potential members, or trying to drive them to revenue-generating sources on their websites." According to Kelly, organic reach via Facebook generally tops out at around 6%, and she said many page administrators are stuck with poor outreach because marketing budgets often don't account for social media expenses. But many social media managers also have lamented that it's increasingly difficult to cut through the clutter and get their message out, even if they're willing to pay.