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Social media is a difficult and ever changing industry to work in, which is why all successful social media agencies have certain traits and characteristics common to them explaining their success. This article will share some of these and give you hints on how to make your social media agency successful!
Continuous Learning
Social Media changes extremely quickly, even by modern standards. For the last five years, the industry has been flipped on it’s head several times. This is for two main reasons. Firstly, there are top down changes by Twitter, Facebook and Google have forced social media agencies to adapt or die. New tools or ways of doing things are released at a moment’s notice, and best practices must be taken on board quickly to avoid getting left behind.
Second, there are bottom up changes coming from the users and clients. Clients’ expectations of social media continuously change, for example how ROI should be recorded or what kind of involvement the social media agency should have with the in house team. Second, users have changing demands on what businesses should offer to them, and what they are happy with. Some changes by the social media networks have been reactionary to accommodate these demands, while others are more imposed changes to help the network.
The crux of the matter is, that a successful social media agency should be one that can adapt with ease and has a constant learning and development programme for it’s employees so best practices are always adhered to.
Know How Social Fits The Customer’s Needs
The second most important thing that a successful social media agency should know is how social media fits in with the customer’s needs and user behaviour. This is important as it essentially determines how the agency is to use social media to benefit their client. Importantly, knowing how to deliver value to users is crucial. Social media is like a newspaper. Without readers, no business would buy advertising space. Without good editorial content, there would be no readers. While it might be tempting to pay for advertising space on a social network, this would not actually add value to the network.
Looking back to the newspaper, readers don't read them for their adverts, they read them for the editorial content. Successful social media agencies know this, and make sure their client IS the editorial content on social media, and is effectively adding value to their fans and followers.
Finally, an effective social media agency is one that knows where social media fits into the sales funnel. Many inexperienced agencies and marketers make the mistake of seeing a Facebook page as a mirror of a website, as a place low in the sales funnel and a place for making sales. This is wrong. Social media belongs at the top of the funnel. It’s aim is to generate soft leads by building awareness, demonstrating social proof and delivering useful information. The goal of a successful social media campaign is to convert these soft leads, i.e. the fans and followers, into hard leads, by transferring them to a better situation to deal with potential buyers, for example an email list or website. Only then can the ultimate goal of using social media as a sales tool be realised.
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