How does social media marketing fit into your company’s overall communications strategy? Are you able to track its effectiveness and impact on other areas of the business? How does the content align with your company’s overarching brand voice? These are just some of the questions that should regularly be asked to make sure that social media is working as hard as possible for you. In short, it’s time to get serious about social.

Perhaps because of the way in which we interact with it in our own non-professional lives, social media sometimes doesn’t get the attention it deserves within the workplace; instead it operates in a silo and is seen as some sort of pet project. But this channel has matured and for it to work effectively, should be carefully interwoven within the integrated marketing and communications plan.

Here are some of our top tips for spring-cleaning your social media strategy:

Start with the basics

Social media is more than just a marketing tool; it is a business development tool, post-sales tool and customer service tool. But equally, to maintain a consistent tone and brand voice, it’s a risk to allow multiple employees to publish content. Instead – and depending on the size of your company – try limiting the responsibility to a small number of gatekeepers (eg within the marketing department) and arm them with a clear process for accessing information within other departments to ensure content is always correct.

Once the marketing team regains control, get them in the habit of re-evaluating company messaging and objectives at least on a monthly basis. Take control of what’s being projected to the world by clearly aligning content to purpose. Too often social media can go ‘off-message’ with content pushed out for content’s sake rather than tied to a specific purpose.

Consider a boost

Most marketers focus their time on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Luckily, it’s relatively easy to advertise on all of these platforms. Even with the smallest budget, social media advertising can greatly increase the size of your audience—when done right.

Perhaps one of the easiest ways get additional attention is by using Facebook to boost the best posts straight from the timeline. You can choose to push the post to “people who like your page and their friends” or “people you choose through targeting” depending on the nature of the message and your marketing goals. For even more targeting, pricing and bidding options, promote a post instead using the Ads Manager.

Promoting posts on Twitter works similarly and should be used when you have an upcoming announcement or campaign that would benefit from a larger audience. Again, think about who exactly you should be targeting with the news and proceed accordingly. The other option on Twitter is to promote an account. Go with this choice if increasing followers is your main objective.

LinkedIn allows you to create two kinds of ads. A sponsored update resembles a post and shows up in the news feed of you targeted audience. Text ads on the other hand, are not as well disguised and show up in the form of more traditional ads.

One of the added benefits of advertising through Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn is built in measuring tools that helps you easily identify what worked and what didn’t.

Spend time on engagement

Get the attention of important social media influencers by following their news, sharing their content, and offering up unique perspectives when possible. Also, come up with creative ways to get people to engage with you. For instance, contests and giveaways announced on social media are great ways to get people to listen to your message.

If you’d like our expert advice in helping your company build a stellar presence on social media, as ever, please get in touch.