Your company is ready to go! Everyone is on-board and excited to begin using social media. Your team has a copy of our eBook “Training Your Company for Social Media” and they’re thinking what’s next? Perhaps the best place to start is by making sure that everyone’s on the same page.

Educate and Inform

If your social media team represents several different departments within your company then you’ve got a great head start. Each person has an opportunity to educate and inform the rest of the team about how their department could use social media advantageously. This way, no matter who’s speaking on behalf of your brand, they’ll be able to respond to questions, comments or concerns intelligently, especially if it’s their area of expertise. It’s also a great way to stay informed on what’s going on in each department. We’ll be talking more about internal sharing, why it’s important, and ways to achieve it, in a later post.

What if your social media team doesn’t represent a variety of departments? That’s alright, too. Arm each department with knowledge. Then, appoint one person (maybe the most social media savvy of the group) as the knowledge bearer. That way, your staff is able to easily and efficiently access information, if your social media team is not available. Also, it’s important that your team knows your company’s social media guidelines, and is able to reference them whenever they need to.

Consider Your Brand’s Profile

Now that you’ve taken care of getting everyone on the same page across departments, you can begin to think about your brand’s social profiles. Let’s use Twitter as an example. There are a few things you’ll want to think about before you go public: will your team will be engaging from their individual accounts or from one corporate handle? If they’ll be responding from the corporate handle, will they identify themselves with proper names like Dell’s team does, and will you include that in the bio like we do or somewhere on the page as Comcast has done?

Also, since your company profile will be seen by everyone interacting with your brand you may wish to incorporate what your company does, what type of information you’ll be sharing and even some traditional ways to reach you, like MindActive does, in your profile’s background.

If your team will be using individual accounts will they need to use the brand name within it (ex: BrandNameBob) or can they use their own names as long as their bio identifies their position within your company? Can they be creative or do they need to be more corporate? How open is your company to allowing your team members to find their own voice and tone? It might not seem like a big deal but allowing people to feel comfortable is the first step to authenticity while representing your brand.

It’s important to remember that there’s no right or wrong decision but rather what decision works best for your company’s corporate culture.

In closing, here are a few other things to keep in mind before you go public:

• It’s a conversation
• Be open and honest
• Be considerate
• Be accurate
• Add value
• Own your words
• If you make a mistake, admit it

You can review even more tips and see how some of your favorite brands handle social media at the Online Database of Social Media Policies.

We hope you’re feeling that much more confident about taking the leap into social media. What else would you like to know? What can we delve deeper into to give you a better understanding about corporate social media? Please let us know in the comments below.