Consulting | Coaching | Communicating

One of the most challenging aspects of running social media for a large organization can be coordinating and facilitating communications between departments in the company. It’s easy for the social media manager to become siloed, or, if you don’t have buy-in from all departments, it can be difficult or impossible to get the information you need to be successful. Keep in mind that running an account for a large brand may include most or all of the following tasks:

• Customer Service
• Design
• Marketing
• Recruiting
• Copywriting
• Digital advertising
• Sales
• Lead generation
• Reputation management

Break Down Organizational Silos

If your organization is involved in launching a social media strategy, or if you’ve been participating for some time but aren’t seeing the results you expected, ask yourself if your company fits this description.

• Departments are siloed
• Social media is seen as a marketing function only
• When you ask for input department heads tell you they don’t have time
• Social media team leaders are not included in other marketing efforts
• Department heads can’t provide the answers to questions posed on social media pages, or they don’t think it’s important
• Timely responses are impossible to come by

In a perfect world, the social media marketer should be able to coordinate efforts from customer service, marketing, human resources and, sometimes, front line operations, to facilitate the company in being social as an organization. Companies need to embrace this philosophy before their social media efforts will truly be successful.

Getting Started as a Social Media Manager in a New Organization

As soon as you join a new organization as a social media manager, start by asking to be included in sales meetings, spend time with customer service, and be included in other marketing operations. Introduce yourself, or ask your manager to introduce you, to the heads of these departments. Take leadership of the effort! Determine your customer’s pain points, their personas, your brand voice, and culture.

Determine Business Goals

Start by determining the business goals for which you can align your proposed content calendar. Some of those goals might look like:

• Sales leads
• Conversions
• Website Traffic
• Brand Recognition
• Brand Reputation

Determine Social Media Metrics

Be prepared to provide meaningful metrics as to how you plan to measure success against those goals and ask for support and coordination. Some of those metrics might look like this:

• Website conversions from social referrals
• Website traffic from social referrals
• Reach
• Impressions
• Sentiment

Take Leadership!

Talk about what you are doing within the company and why you’re doing it. Involve the thought leaders and the decision-makers in your company, and sell what you are doing to them. Your efforts will provide big dividends in the long term.