Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Preparing Your Employees for Social Media Networking

A great social media campaign can be damaged if your employees are not given the information they need to support it. How often have you had a store employee say to you, “I don’t know anything about that promotion. They never tell us anything”? It seems like it would be obvious, but in the whirl of planning and executing, managers often leave out the staff completely. If you are planning a social media campaign, you must make sure that everyone on staff supports the effort. Following are some important issues you must equip your employees to understand:

Your employees must know the real value consumers place on your products.

Reality can sometimes be in limited supply when managers plan their SMM promotions. It’s important to know the real value customers place on your products, not the value you hope for. Social media tools allow you to get direct feedback and reviews from your customers. In order to plan effectively, your staff needs to know what they will encounter when customers talk back. Make sure that someone who has been on the front lines (like customer service) is part of the team.

Employees need to mine the intellectual property hidden inside your business to create products and services.

Some managers wonder why their ...