Manage Conversations Effectively in Twitter and Facebook: Part 2, Plan Ahead

At Connections 2012, I hosted a panel featuring Joel Ballezza of Brooks Running and Allison Gonzalez of Carter’s. We spoke about the top three ways you can manage social conversations more effectively, using SocialEngage:

1. Staff for Success
2. Plan Ahead
3. Track and Adapt in Real Time

In case you missed it, this blog series will bring you up to speed on the best of the session, including attendee feedback. Leave your own tips in the comments section!

Planning is critical to social media success. If you or your company first got involved in social media as a response to conversations your customers were having without you – you may find yourself years down the road still playing that reactive role.

But it’s time to take the reigns. Planning can be the difference between making it by and being truly successful, in handling inbound volume as well as in publishing outbound content.

Let’s start with planning ahead to handle inbound volume more efficiently. First, think about the common questions you answer and information you provide, and format these into short, quick responses. If your company requires approvals, get these drafts approved ahead of time so you can use them immediately when needed. 

Second, think about what phrases, beyond your own brand, product and service names, you’ll want to monitor for opportunities or for crisis management. Save these search terms somewhere you can access them quickly.

On the outbound side, scheduling updates can alleviate the pressure for marketers and publishers to be constantly sharing new and interesting content. Schedule out using your existing marketing and editorial calendar to create matching social posts giving you a baseline of content that you can add to over time.

Here are some ways to use SocialEngage to put the tips above into practice:

At Brooks Running, Joel was faced with the challenge of keeping the information shared via their social channels both consistent and highly relevant and personal. To do that, he spent some time planning ahead and set up his SocialEngage account accordingly.

First, he set up a list of search categories, for example about a particular product line like PureDrift. Then he created snippets, or pre-written text, based on information that would come in handy in those categories. Things like FAQ type answers, links (already shortened using bit.ly) and contact information for support to use in cases where people had specific order questions.

Pulling all this together, Joel was able to cut response time from over 2+ days to less than 24 hours. He continues to monitor response rate and response time to measure his success and finds that since implementing this he and his team can serve more customers, generate more retweets and earn more followers. He’s also increasing engagement and service levels without adding more staff, creating a cost saving for his group.

At the session, most of the audience tweets were impressed with Brooks’ success, but I’d like to know, what other ways are there to save time and money like Brooks by implementing some planning ideas? Leave a comment with your best planning tips and results!