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It’s also no coincidence that the rise of social media has corresponded with this more personal way of doing business, but it hasn’t escaped our attention that not everyone ‘does’ social. So what are the barriers to social media and how can you go about breaking them down?

1: Time

Quite possibly one of the greatest barriers to social media — and the reason many companies turn to us — is time. Particularly when business is good, social media can seem like an unnecessary distraction. We all know about the dangers of neglecting our human relationships though, and it’s no different in business.

Look at tools like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite to speed up the process of scheduling and posting, and Feedly and Curata to access quality content quickly.

2: Inspiration

Hand in hand with lack of time goes lack of inspiration. It can be hard to be creative, witty and social every day.

The scheduling and curation tools mentioned above will help — you can create a bucket of great content when the ideas are flowing. You can then drip-feed it out over the following days, weeks and months as you see fit.

Websites like Days of the Year offer a more useful, if quirky, source of inspiration — we’re particularly amused by the upcoming ‘No Beard Day’!

3: Culture

Number three on the list — and possibly the hardest to overcome — is culture.

We often hear that “this company will never be social”, but, when you look at the figures, it soon becomes apparent that social media can help you:

• drive website traffic and sales
• slash lead-generation costs
• provide great insights into your audience

This is where you need to educate and motivate your workforce. You could even gamify the process, creating internal leaderboards for those who are most socially active.

Want to read more about the inherent value of social media to your content strategy? Why not check out our article on why social posts are such a vital part of content success. Or, if you want to carry on the conversation feel free to share your thoughts, questions and tips in the comments section below, or tell us about it on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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Answer: Almost anyone in your organisation.

Whether a part of your marketing, sales, customer support or even financial teams, your organisation is full of people with ideas – and many of them will already be avid social media users. By sharing your social media strategy you can get ideas out of their heads and supercharge your social media strategy.

How?
You need to create a space where people can share information and ideas in a collaborative fashion. If you’re using a system such as Lync, Yammer, or any tool that can host a chat room or forum, that’s the place to start. Invite the people you want to get ideas from, share your strategy with them, and see how they react. If your organisation doesn’t use these tools, then you could hold a face-to-face meeting to brainstorm ideas and responses to your strategy. You can use email as a last resort, but it’s much harder to be collaborative via email – not to mention heavy on the inbox!

Why?
There are more than a few benefits to getting social media enthusiasts within your organisation to comment on your plans, but these are HN’s top three:

1: Spot hidden pitfalls
Other people in your organisation who know how social media works may see hazards that you or your team have missed: openings for people to hijack your campaign (like the ill-fated #waitrosereasons campaign from a few years ago, for example), or important calendar events that aren’t in your schedule, but really should be. Not an opportunity to be missed!

2: New angles = new opportunities
The fresh perspective that people from other parts of your organisation bring to your strategy isn’t just good for spotting problems. Someone in sales might know about some content that would be perfect to build into your campaign; someone who uses Pinterest regularly might show you a feature you hadn’t known about before, but would be perfect for your strategy. A few little tips like these can make a big difference to the success of your strategy.

3: Harness the power of your people
Getting internal teams to support campaigns, or even the day-to-day activity on a feed, is one of the trickiest things we see organisations attempt with their social media. By sharing your strategy with social media enthusiasts within your organisation, you show them exactly what’s coming, when it’s coming, and how they can support it. Make them feel a part of the plan, and they’ll be much more likely to engage with it – and to encourage others to get involved, too.

Do you have any stories about using your in-house talent for social media? Let us know how it went in the comments section, or on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Or are they?

It’s fair to say that activities such as these are regarded as risk-taking behaviour when it comes to B2B social media, and so are avoided for fear of landing your organisation in hot water. But, by avoiding some of the potential pitfalls of social media, many businesses are failing to realise the benefits of this enormously powerful tool — opportunities to engage, impress and make the most of your social media following. Of course it’s never a good idea to invade threads and conversations on social media to try and sell your products, but here at HN we’ve chosen the top three risks you should take on social media — and how to take them as safely as possible.

Get your audience’s attention — don’t talk about yourself

“That content isn’t about us, so why are we posting it? We want our audience to hear about us, not about trivia and current events!”

A common complaint, but think — would you normally talk only about yourself in conversation? Social media isn’t like advertising, or an email, where the focus is all on you — it’s a tool to have conversations with your audience, so you have to talk about stuff that interests them. Of course, you want your organisation to be of interest to your audience, but realistically you won’t be the only thing that lights a fire in your audience’s belly. In fact, some of our clients devote as much as 80% of their social media time to talking about relevant events and topics that will interest their audience. It helps them become established as a good place to go for information, which at the same time increases the visibility of the content they do put out about themselves.

How to stay safe:

• Scan content before posting to make sure it isn’t from a competitor’s website, or badly written (otherwise people may associate the bad writing with you).

• Always try to mention your sources – it can widen your audience, and makes it clear you are not trying to pass off someone else’s content as your own.

Win them over with your sense of humour

“We can’t post that, even though it’s funny — what if someone finds it offensive?”

There’s no escaping it — injecting humour into your social media can backfire (does anyone remember this example from KLM?) Get it right, though, and your audience will respect you for it, and you can sometimes get a big spike in your engagement. If someone tries to engage with your brand in an amusing way, then by ignoring them you could come off as stuffy or lacking a sense of humour, which could be more damaging than having said something.

How to stay safe:

• Understand your audience’s sense of humour — if they don’t get the joke, then there’s no point!

• Test any potential humour you intend to post with people both inside and outside your organisation, to get an objective view on whether it could be misinterpreted or just isn’t funny.

• Avoid controversial jokes — there’s just too much potential for someone to get upset. If your mother wouldn’t approve, it’s probably safest not to hit ‘send’.

Put your audience to work — interact with your followers

“Best not to talk to our audience — I don’t want to see our company maligned all over social media!”

Your followers are the lifeblood of your social communities, so if you don’t engage with them you’ll never be able to properly leverage the power they have to offer your organisation as a source of insight, feedback and brand-building opportunities. It can be a scary thought that people can say what they like about your brand, but giving them that freedom — and responding appropriately if they choose to say something negative — will win you the approval of your followers.

How to stay safe:

• Monitor your channels so that you can respond to engagement in a timely fashion — nobody likes to be left hanging.

• Word any questions you plan on asking your followers carefully, to minimise the opportunity for negative comments (test your posts with the same group you tested your jokes with if you’re unsure).

• If you do come in for some criticism, handle it honestly, proactively and without delay. Your followers will notice and respect you for it.

• Avoid getting embroiled in online slanging matches though — if someone won’t respond to reason, you can always report them to an administrator.

Warning

It would be wrong to say that, just by following these tips, you’ll automatically be safe from any negative experiences on social media. It takes practice and experience to get a feel for what risks you can take and which ones to avoid for your organisation. If your social media channels already have a well-established voice, then you may also want to think carefully about how you take these risks — especially with humour, if your brand isn’t normally one to crack a joke. But, by following these tips, you can reduce the chances of a social media disaster while getting the most out of your social media presence.

Have you taken risks on your social media? How did it go? Let us know in the comments section, or on our Twitter feed @hnmarketing – it would be great to hear from you!

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But is it really, though?

If our attention spans are so poor, how can I have sat and spent at least 10 minutes on this article already, without wandering away from my desk? How do I regularly drive up to Leeds without getting distracted and missing my junction? How do our customers get through RFP documents, which are often long and complex, without giving up?

The answer is simple: there’s nothing wrong with our attention span. It’s our motivation as consumers of content that’s being affected.

Motivation is the key
Think of it this way: you’ll watch a documentary, or read a book for an evening, because you’re interested in the content you’re consuming, and (especially in the case of fiction) because you’re emotionally invested in it. That interest motivates us to pay attention long after we theoretically should have become distracted and disappeared, and it’s this same motivation (or lack of it) that’s responsible for the rise in snackable content.

By keeping content short, marketers can convey their message to the audience before that audience has lost interest and moved on. There’s no denying that this is a powerful weapon in the marketer’s arsenal, but to say that it’s the only tool that works any more makes the assumption that there’s nothing you can do about your audience’s motivation to pay attention to your organisation. That simply isn’t true. After all, in the B2B world the customer is at some point going to have to sit down and pay attention to someone – they’re spending, in some cases, tens of thousands of pounds on a purchase – so the job of the marketer is to motivate the customer to pay attention to their brand over the competition’s. That’s where snackable content comes in.

Hook, line and sinker
In the same way that the advert for that documentary we were talking about earlier motivated you to sit down and watch the whole thing, snackable content needs to motivate the customer to sit down and take a proper look at your proposition. It’s not about giving them a condensed version of your entire proposition or message, but giving them just enough to pique their interest and pointing them towards your longer content that conveys your message and your proposition in full. A tweet that leads to a webinar; a blog post that links to a white paper; these are examples of how snackable and long-form content can form a powerful one-two punch that entices an unmotivated audience to engage with you.

The trick, as you’ve no doubt guessed, is making that snackable content as juicy and inviting as you can. Though the analogy of a goldfish might not be quite accurate (they have memories of up to three months, according to Wikipedia ), it’s true that your audience are busy people who have information coming at them from all angles. Short content that shines like a diamond is required to get them to notice you – but once they do, don’t feel pressured into saying everything you have to say in a rush. Treat snackable content as a gateway to the wonders of your longer content, and you’ll find that your audience do, too.

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1. Upload your video, tweet about it, and share it on Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.
2. Repeat those postings using a different strapline — retweeting your video multiple times keeps it at the top of your followers’ feeds without it feeling stale.
3. Embed your video in multiple posts. Whenever you tackle a similar subject, re-embed the video, or at least link back to it. This will improve the stickiness of your blog and will extend dwell time — the time people spend looking at your content.
4. Share your video via “reasons to talk” emails with your own contacts and prospects, and give your sales team a powerful conversation-starter.
5. Extend your video’s reach by storing it on your YouTube channel — repurposing content is another great way to extend its shelf life.
6. Re-edit, or even chop up, videos to make new content.
7. Refresh your video by adding new introductions, graphics, voiceovers, incidental music and even new calls to action.
8. Expand your target market by dubbing your content into another language, adding subtitles or including market-specific offers.
9. Use the videos as excerpts in other videos to show how far your brand has come, like the Fairy Liquid TV adverts which show the brand’s evolution through the ages.

If you would like to discuss your video marketing programme with us, just give us a call on +44 1628 622187.

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