Sometimes we have to play bad cop. Sometimes we have to play good cop

It’s often the case with social media that you have to highlight bad practice in the marketing and branding world. It becomes a talking point and you’ll often hear us talk about companies being overly sales-ey, having no engagement, not marketing enough and trying to cut corners on their marketing via automation. We do this because we believe that raising the standards of marketing is important.

But one thing we don’t often talk about is the positive culture we like to put in place around social media marketing with the clients we work with day in day out

Every Monday we feedback positive social media news to clients

I’ve never been one of these people who subscribes to the fact that Monday is the worst day of the week. I absolutely love Monday because it’s a time when great things happen and the possibilities are endless. I feel a massive amount of love for Monday. But I’m aware that for some people, Monday is the day after they’ve spent the whole weekend with family, they might feel pressure at work and that one angry email or poor review at 9am on a Monday can send a person spiralling into a bad mood or even worse depression. Literally those 1st few hours of a Monday set the tone for the week ahead

I think it’s really important to feedback positive news about social media to clients and really motivate them. Your email could be the first positive thing a person has seen that day and it’s really really important that you’re the person who makes their Monday that little bit brighter

We try and hero individuals who have received great reviews, a blog has gone down well or they’ve sent us content that has flown

Hero-ing individuals is so important. Creating a positive culture around social media rather than blame culture for the smallest mistakes is something for us that can only be a positive. We are used to a world where the media will destroy someone’s career for a tiny blip or mistake on social media and it turns employees into a permanent worried state because of things like this. But how often are the positives of social media fed back to staff members. We always like to feedback if a staff member is mentioned in a review or something positive about a particular service / product is mentioned

Acknowledging when people are doing well is important and the competitive nature of employees often means that others will step up their game at the same time

We find that doing these 2 simple things means we have a better relationship with clients

One of the biggest mistakes I made in the past was not doing this with clients as it meant often we could be seen as bringers of bad news if we had to tell them about issues such as “bad reviews” or “lack of content”

In fact I’ll be 100% honest. Looking back I think we lost one of our clients by simply not feeding back the great work that was being done on social. Occasionally I’ll look at what the client is doing in house now on Social Media, and ego aside, it isn’t a patch on what we were doing, but we never fed back to the client how well the content was doing. The client simply didn’t know and they’re now in a worse place for it

Unless you talk about positive news, unless you view social media as positive and tell other, people don’t often realise positives are happening

How do instil a positive culture around social media in your business?

– Everyone gets involved in Social Media from the top to the bottom
– Once a week write down a list of the positive social media highlights and share them across the organisation in weekly meetings
– Hero members of staff who have had their moment in the spotlight
– Acknowledge negatives – but only to accentuate how much of a positive the changes will make
– Show the impact of how social media impacts the organisation & ask members of staff how you would improve the social media for the business

Do all of the above on a regular basis rather than once a month or once a year

Being positive about Social Media yields great results

NEED HELP WITH YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA?
Chat to us about Social Media Marketing for YOUR organisation , so we can better understand YOU and what will grow your organisation

We can only find out what is unique to your business by chatting with you

Look at our Social Media Training and Social Media Management services

Or Please call Alex on 07806774279 or email alex@altrinchamhq.co.uk

Alex

Alex McCann is owner of Altrincham HQ – a social media management and training company based in Altrincham, Cheshire that has worked with 100s of local business developing their social media strategy. Alex has 350+ LinkedIn testimonials and is ranked number 1 for Social Media Marketing in the UK via independent customer reviews on Freeindex.