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In a previous post Jo Caudron outlined the importance of the Inbound social media strategy to listen to your audience, based on our model called ‘The 5 C’s of engagement’. In this post I want to elaborate on the Outbound social media strategy, and the importance of designing so called ‘social objects’. Because feeding the social streams is as important for your organization as a listening-strategy to create engagement.
What are social objects?
Social objects are the fuel of the social web. They are the things that people like to share, like and comment on within their networks. A social object can be an announcement, a piece of music, a picture, a compelling video, an idea, a question, a quote… Literally everything can be a social object. As long as it’s in any way relevant for the audience. And as long as it triggers interaction.
People love social objects, because it’s how they build their identities. A few years ago there was a lot of buzz about what was called ‘user generated content’, i.e. content published by ‘ordinary’ people like you and me. As it turns out, it seems that most people are just lazy (or not creative enough) and prefer to share or react on content made by others. So people fuel their networks with social objects they’ve found elsewhere. The whole social system is built on it.
Designing social objects to trigger interaction
When thinking about an Outbound social media strategy, companies should define and design their social objects. The objective of these social objects is to trigger interaction. Interaction as in sharing, commenting or ‘liking’. It’s not just about pushing things in the stream to count on views. Forget the ‘display’ idea, from now on you should design for interaction.
But most companies don’t manage to create a long term outbound social strategy.
- They are simply not used to it, because PR- and ad agencies have always done the talking for them.
- They think they have very few social objects to share because they consider outbound communication as ‘rational’ information like product announcements or promotions. Nothing wrong with that, but that’s just the ‘traditional’ and ‘corporate’ speak we’ve known for years. Social objects have a much broader range.
There’s no rule saying that you have to be boring as a company. Think about your company culture as a giant social object, and introduce your audience into the heart of your business. Show them around by sharing pictures of your team, show how your company looks like from the inside, introduce them to your colleagues, tell them what events you’re organizing, what plans you have for the future or the weekend,,…etc. Once again: anything can be a social object, don’t limit yourself to the traditional corporate communication items. Think about what makes people tick.
3 Steps:
- Make a listing of all your social objects and put them in manageable categories: company news, company vision, company culture, company presentations, industry trends, product information, product promotions, company events, company history…
- Set up a structured WHO, WHEN, WHERE planThink about a kind of ‘content’ calendar in which you outline the flow of your social objects:
- Who is going to distribute your social objects ?
- When are they put into the stream? At what frequency (note that you can have ‘continuous objects’ and ‘ad hoc objects’).
- Where will you distribute: The way you distribute your social objects is an important step in the process. Make sure you have a solid approach both in terms of format (offer a mix of links, photo, video, audio, presentations,…) and channeling. Use the power of the ‘Big4’ social networks (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn). But also define the niche networks within your industry to target your social objects.
- Plan for conversion. From streams to destinations.
A lot of the social stuff is happening on so called ‘third party’ platforms, where companies need to behave like guests as any other. Therefore it’s important to think about the 2 concepts: ‘streams’ and ‘destinations’.
Streams are ongoing – often real time – conversations on third party social platforms (f.e. people talking on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter,…) You can be the host of certain streams, f.e. on your corporate Facebook page, YouTube channel,…. But you’re always bound to the rules of the platform.
Destinations are the platforms and ‘places’ you own as a company (f.e. your corporate website, corporate blog, mobile app, store,… etc.) Here you control the experience, allowing you to convert people with a call to action that happens on your terms.
So, when feeding the streams with social objects, your goal should be to drive people to your own destinations.
Of course, it’s a two-way system, so build in social features in your destinations (i.e. share buttons) allowing people to pick their favorite social objects they can seed from your destination to the streams.
To wrap it up:
- Think about both an Inbound – and Outbound plan when setting up your social media strategy. Listen first, talk later.
- People love social objects, they are the fuel of social networks through which they build their identities. Help them in doing so.
- Forget the display idea, design for interaction.
- Start with defining your list of social objects. Think out of the box. There’s no rule saying that you have to be boring as a company. Show your face & culture.
- Set up a structured WHO, WHEN, WHERE plan to make the distribution of social objects sustainable in the long run.
- Convert people from the streams to your destinations.
- Measure the level of interaction and impact. Rinse & repeat.
What about your Outbound-flow? What are your social objects?
