If you’re already managing social media for an enterprise business, you know how complex and overwhelming it can be. Often, you have to navigate multiple social media accounts across various platforms, manage different teams and departments with varying goals, and keep up with a constantly changing social media landscape.
A strong and well-structured enterprise social media strategy is crucial for success in this highly competitive environment. It provides a roadmap for your team to follow, keeps everyone aligned with the company’s goals and messaging, and allows scalability as your brand grows.
This guide provides a comprehensive framework and best practices for building and launching a strong enterprise social media strategy.
In this article:
– What is social media marketing?
– Benefits of social media marketing for enterprises
– What’s unique about enterprise social media strategy and management?
– What are the essential components of enterprise social media strategy?
– 5 Steps for building your enterprise social media strategy
– 3 Steps for launching your enterprise social media strategy
– Helpful tools to use for enterprise social media strategy
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing requires interacting with various social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok, to connect with your target audience and promote your brand, products, or services.
It involves creating and sharing content, engaging with followers, running ads and promotions, and analyzing data to drive business objectives. With the widespread use of social media—over 5.07 billion people are active social media users—it is a vital element in any business’s marketing strategy, particularly for large enterprises.
Over the years, social media marketing has evolved from basic brand pages to complex, multi-channel campaigns that drive real business results. Brands are no longer simply creating profiles to share updates, promotions, and general information about their products or services. Today, social media plays a much larger role in the customer journey, from brand awareness to post-purchase engagement.
Benefits of social media marketing for enterprises
Social media marketing offers numerous benefits that contribute to achieving strategic business outcomes like revenue growth, market expansion, and brand loyalty. These include:
Social trust
Engaging consistently and authentically with your audience on social media helps establish trust. This leads to stronger customer relationships and increased brand loyalty, which in turn leads to higher sales and revenue.
There are several ways enterprises can establish social trust on social media, including:
- Transparency and authenticity: Be open and honest with your audience about your brand, products, and values. Share behind-the-scenes content and customer stories, and respond to criticism or feedback genuinely and empathetically.
- Responsiveness: Monitor social media conversations about your brand and promptly respond to followers’ questions, comments, or concerns. Have a designated team member or department responsible for managing social media engagement to ensure timely responses.
- Valuable social media content: Share educational, entertaining, or informative content that provides value to your audience. This can include industry insights, how-to guides, or user-generated content featuring your products or services.
Brand visibility
With billions of active users worldwide, social media provides an unparalleled opportunity for enterprises to reach large, diverse audiences across various demographics, locations, and interests. A consistent and strategic social media presence increases brand visibility and recognition, making your brand top-of-mind when customers need products or services that you provide.
Targeted campaigns are one of the best ways to enhance your brand visibility on social media. With targeted campaigns, you tailor your messaging and content to resonate with each audience segment, increasing engagement and conversions.
Customer relationships
Unlike traditional marketing channels, social media channels allow two-way communication between your brand and your customers. This presents an invaluable opportunity to build and nurture customer relationships, which is essential for driving long-term loyalty and advocacy.
Some effective ways to use social media for customer relationship management include:
- Personalized responses: If using social media as a customer service outlet, use their names, interests, or past purchase information to personalize your responses and make them feel seen and valued.
- Exclusive content: Offer exclusive discounts, promotions, or behind-the-scenes content to your social media followers to reward them for their loyalty and engagement.
- Community building: Create online communities or forums and encourage discussions, collaborations, and user-generated content to foster a sense of belonging and loyalty among your customer base.
What’s unique about enterprise social media strategy and management?
While social media marketing is essential for businesses of all sizes, enterprise-level operations require a unique approach due to the scale and complexity involved. Below are some key elements that differentiate enterprise social media strategy and management from that of small businesses or startups.
Complexity
Managing social media at the enterprise level typically involves multiple specialized teams, diverse stakeholders, and complex approval processes. Enterprise social media teams must balance various departments’ needs and priorities, ensure content aligns with the broader business strategy, and maintain a consistent brand image. This complexity calls for robust management and collaboration tools, streamlined workflows, and clear communication channels to align all social media activities.
Organizational scale
Due to the sheer size and scale of enterprises, social media strategies at this level must cater to a diverse audience across multiple platforms, languages, and regions. This requires a cohesive brand voice that remains consistent across all channels while allowing for localized content that resonates with specific audiences.
To achieve this, enterprises must have:
- A robust content management system to organize, schedule, and publish content across various channels.
- Local teams or agencies that understand the target audience in specific geographic areas and can create and manage content accordingly.
- Clear communication channels between different departments, teams, and regions to maintain consistency and avoid duplicating efforts.
- Integrated analytics and reporting tools to track the performance of social media activities across different regions, languages, and channels.
Regulatory considerations
Adhering to industry regulations and internal compliance standards adds complexity to social media management at any level. However, enterprises must take extra special care to have a robust governance framework. Larger organizations are frequently under greater scrutiny than small businesses; they often have more stakeholders, a more significant public presence, and a more established reputation to uphold.
As a result, there’s greater pressure to ensure every T is crossed and every I is dotted to ensure all social media activities comply with relevant laws, regulations, and company policies. To do this, enterprises must incorporate the following into their social media strategies:
- Regular audits and updates of social media policies to reflect changes in regulations or company guidelines.
- Employee training on social media best practices, compliance, and proper use of company-owned social media accounts.
- Clear social media guidelines on how to handle sensitive or controversial topics and procedures for addressing any potential PR or legal issues.
- Strict approval processes for content and campaigns to ensure they adhere to regulations and company standards before publishing.
- Continuous monitoring and tracking of social media mentions, comments, and posts to identify and address any compliance issues promptly.
- Non-compliance can lead to legal action, reputational damage, and loss of customer trust.
What are the essential components of enterprise social media strategy?
An enterprise’s social media strategy will vary depending on its size, industry, and target audience. However, some essential components are fundamental to all successful enterprise social media strategies:
- Goal setting: Clear, measurable, and time-bound business goals are critical for guiding all social media activities and measuring their success. Goals can include increasing brand awareness, improving customer satisfaction, boosting website traffic, or generating leads and sales. Aligning these goals with overall business objectives ensures that social media efforts contribute to the enterprise’s bottom line.
- Audience targeting: Identifying and understanding your target audience is critical for creating relevant, engaging content that resonates with them. Conduct market research, analyze customer data, and monitor social media conversations to determine your audience’s demographics, interests, and pain points.
- Content creation: Enterprises must have a well-defined content creation process that includes market research, ideation, creation, and distribution. The content should align with the audience’s interests, cater to different stages of the customer journey, and uphold the brand’s voice and values.
- Channel selection: Enterprises must identify which channels their target audience frequents and understand how to use each platform’s features effectively. This allows for customized content tailored to each platform, increasing the reach and engagement of social media efforts.
- Engagement and community management: Social media is inherently a two-way communication platform, and enterprises must actively engage with their audience to foster relationships and build a loyal community. This includes promptly responding to comments, messages, and mentions, addressing customer concerns, and leveraging user-generated content.
- Performance measurement: Measuring the success of social media marketing efforts is crucial for determining what works and what doesn’t. This allows for data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement.
To achieve a successful enterprise social media strategy, all these components must work together seamlessly and align with the broader marketing and organizational objectives. Regular evaluations and adjustments are necessary to adapt to changing market trends, audience preferences, and business needs.
5 steps for building your enterprise social media strategy
Building an effective social media strategy requires a systematic and customizable approach that aligns with an enterprise’s unique goals. These five steps provide a framework for developing a successful enterprise social media strategy:
1. Conduct a social media audit
First, assess your current social media presence by conducting a thorough audit of your existing accounts. Evaluate your social media profiles, content, engagement metrics, alignment with brand goals, and overall performance against your set objectives.
Here are key questions to consider during an audit:
- Are your social media profiles complete and up-to-date?
- Do your profiles align with your brand identity and voice?
- Are you consistently posting high-quality, engaging content that resonates with your audience?
- What is your engagement rate? Are you actively responding to comments and messages from followers?
- Which platforms are performing well, and which ones are not meeting your expectations?
- Are you achieving your set social media goals? If not, what factors could be hindering your success?
Performing a social media audit helps you identify your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. It also allows you to benchmark your social media performance against competitors and industry standards.
2. Define clear objectives and KPIs
Based on your social media audit findings, establish clear and specific goals for your social media strategy. These should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). For example:
- Increase brand awareness by 20% within six months.
- Generate 500 leads through social media in the next quarter.
- Boost website traffic by 25% in the next year.
- Increase customer satisfaction rating on social media to 4.5 out of 5 within six months.
Once you have your goals set, determine which KPIs will indicate progress and success towards these goals, such as:
- Reach and impressions.
- Engagement rate (likes, comments, shares).
- Website traffic from social media.
- Conversions (leads or sales) attributed to social media efforts.
- Customer sentiment and satisfaction ratings.
Choose KPIs that directly align with your goals and regularly track and analyze them to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy.
3. Identify your target audience
To effectively target your audience on social media, you must first identify who they are and understand their needs and preferences. Conduct market research and analyze customer data to determine your audience’s:
- Demographics (age, gender, location, income level, education level).
- Interests and behaviors.
- Online habits and social media usage.
- Pain points and motivations.
With this information, you can create buyer personas—fictional characters that represent your ideal customers—to guide your content creation and targeting efforts. Using buyer personas, you can tailor your content and messaging to resonate with different audience segments, increasing the relevance and effectiveness of your social media efforts.
4. Develop the content strategy
A content strategy will inform what type of content to create, when and how often to post it, and on which platforms. You must also plan a content calendar that balances promotional content with engaging, value-driven posts.
This way, you avoid overwhelming your audience with constant sales pitches and instead provide them with relevant and valuable content that builds brand loyalty.
To create a balanced content calendar:
- Consider the best time to post on each social media platform based on your audience’s online habits.
- Schedule posts in advance and leave room for timely, spontaneous content.
- Repurpose and update old content to keep it fresh.
- Monitor your content performance regularly and adjust accordingly.
5. Establish a governance framework
The final step is to set up a governance framework that outlines policies, guidelines, and approval processes for all social media activities within your organization. You want to ensure consistency and compliance with brand standards, legal requirements, and industry regulations across all your social media efforts.
Your governance framework should meet the following criteria:
- Clear roles and responsibilities for content creation, approval, and publishing.
- Guidelines for brand voice and tone, visual identity, messaging, and crisis management.
- Approval processes for social media campaigns and sponsored posts.
- Protocols for handling customer inquiries, complaints, and user-generated content.
A well-defined governance framework will help protect your brand reputation, maintain consistency, and ensure compliance with regulations.
3 steps for launching your enterprise social media strategy
Launching a social media strategy for your enterprise requires careful planning, coordination, and execution to ensure a successful rollout. It will help you gain a competitive edge and build strong relationships with your target audience. Here are three essential steps to guide your launch:
1. Coordinate with key stakeholders
To effectively coordinate your social media strategy launch, you should engage key stakeholders from various departments, including marketing, PR, customer service, and legal teams.
You need to:
- Schedule a meeting or workshop to introduce the strategy, its objectives, and expected outcomes.
- Share the social media governance framework and seek feedback and input from all teams.
- Discuss how different teams can support and contribute to the strategy (e.g., PR providing press releases for social media, customer service managing inquiries on social media).
- Ensure all teams have the necessary tools and resources to execute the strategy.
All stakeholders should understand their responsibilities and how their contributions fit into the overall social media strategy. This will ensure a coordinated effort and consistent messaging across all departments, thus increasing the impact and effectiveness of your social media efforts.
2. Roll out the content calendar
Rolling out your content calendar involves scheduling and publishing the planned posts on the designated platforms according to the predetermined timeline. To do so effectively:
- Set up a process for content approval before publishing to ensure alignment with brand messaging and consistency.
- Utilize social media management tools to schedule posts in advance and monitor their performance.
- Leverage timely, relevant events or topics to create real-time content that resonates with your audience.
- Monitor and engage with your audience’s comments, messages, and mentions to build relationships and address inquiries or concerns.
Planned content is an important component of an enterprise social media strategy, but brands shouldn’t overlook spontaneous, trendy content. This kind of content helps keep your audience engaged and demonstrates that your brand is relevant and in touch with social media trends. Of course, be careful to follow guidelines and approval processes for spontaneous content just as you would planned content.
3. Monitor and respond in real time
Monitoring and responding in real time allows you to track your content’s performance, engage with your audience, and quickly identify potential issues or opportunities. Here’s how to achieve that:
- Set up social media monitoring tools to track brand mentions, hashtags, and trending topics related to your industry.
- Respond promptly to any inquiries or comments from your audience, including complaints or negative feedback.
- Address any crises promptly and appropriately according to the guidelines outlined in your governance framework.
- Regularly review analytics and insights to track your content’s reach, engagement, and conversion rates.
Continuously monitoring and responding to your social media activity enables you to gather valuable feedback, improve your strategy, and foster a positive relationship with your audience.
Helpful tools to use for enterprise social media strategy
The right tools and tech integrations can help you schedule posts, manage content, and monitor your social media activity in real time. The efficiency and effectiveness of an enterprise social media strategy can be significantly improved with the use of helpful tools.
Social media management
Social media management platforms like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, and Agorapulse offer advanced features for:
- Scheduling posts
- Monitoring engagement and analytics
- Managing multiple social media accounts
These tools can help you save time and effort by allowing you to schedule and publish posts in advance, monitor engagement and sentiment toward your brand, and collaborate with team members instantaneously.
Using a centralized platform can also improve collaboration among team members, reduce confusion or inconsistencies, and ensure compliance with the governance framework.
Analytics and reporting
Reporting and analytics tools will help measure the performance of social media campaigns, track KPIs, and generate insights for continuous improvement. You will get accurate, to-the-minute insights that you can utilize to inform your strategy, measure its impact on business objectives, and make data-driven decisions.
Tools like Bitly can help track link performance, providing valuable insights on click-through rates, traffic sources, and your audience’s geographic location. This information can help refine your targeting efforts and create more compelling content for specific audience segments.
Content creation and curation
Content creation and curation tools help enterprises maintain a consistent flow of engaging content that aligns with their brand messaging and social media strategy.
- Design software like Canva, Lunacy, and Adobe Express help create visually appealing graphics and images for social media posts.
- Video editing tools like Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and Final Cut Pro enable enterprises to create high-quality videos for social media platforms.
- Content curation platforms like Quuu, Feedly, and BuzzSumo provide a curated feed of relevant content and trending topics that enterprises can share with their audience.
Utilizing these tools can help enterprises save time and effort in content creation, maintain a consistent visual aesthetic, and provide valuable, relevant content to their audience.
Transform your enterprise social media with the right tools
Building and launching a solid enterprise social media marketing strategy requires a systematic approach, clear objectives, and appropriate tools to support its implementation.
When enterprises set clear goals, establish a governance framework, and utilize the right tools for social media management, they can effectively engage with their audience, increase brand awareness, and drive business growth.
Bitly’s tools for analytics and reporting, link tracking, and custom branding can support enterprises in managing, tracking, and optimizing their social media efforts for greater success.
Are you ready to transform your enterprise social media management strategy?Get on track toward greater engagement and effectiveness—get started with Bitly today!
