4-11-2014
When it comes to all this digital and social media, people act like it is something new or that it is complicated. It isn?t. It?s just part of the modern job of being an excellent program director, marketing manager, sales manager, morning show talent, salesperson, midday personality, afternoon drive talent, or general manager. Is that everyone? So, how do we make social media simple, easy, and effective so that ratings go up, sales go up, and your station (or cluster) is the most talked about in the market? Let?s take a look under the hood with simple steps to follow to make your social media really roar.
1. Start. Do you know how many people are just doing a little here and a little there, but they haven?t started a real ?program? to get real results. They?re just doing ?stuff? on Facebook and maybe Twitter. Start ?for real? by actively laying out a battle plan and committing. Get up and get moving on social media.
2. Develop your actual strategy at a staff meeting/pizza gathering (or whatever you want to insert for fun team-building with some courtesy to staff for their time). Ask your actual team that will be doing daily posts and having interaction with listeners from work, home, and in between on what they think listeners care about, and what should be involved in your overall social media. This is getting the buy in. Build your plan to have certain percentages of different content and get team members to grab on to what they want to do as a part of regular social media content development for your station brand. This is much more than ?Listen and win a prize.? If you do it as a team and elevate your passions to meet those of your listeners, you will elevate your entire social media impact.
3. Ask them about personal passions that might match the lifestyle of local listeners you most want to attract, and talk about what form that might take to be a regular part of attracting listeners. You have people on your team with passions (such as a love of dogs/cats, gardening, or curing cancer for kids, or perhaps they love high school football. Do you know? Find out). Use those passions where they match your audience and might be an attractant for you to power real impact in social media and bring more local targets to your station passionately as a part of an overall social media content plan.
4. Find the most visual person on your team. Make sure you focus on developing visuals for your social media posts (both pictures and video) that capture attention regularly with your posts.
5. Make it personal. If you didn?t get it from these steps so far, make your social media personal. Include things about you that can create connections for your on-air talent or the overall commitment level of the ownership, management, station. People respond to authenticity and they respond to personal.
6. In keeping with number 5 above, work to connect listeners to your talent in social media and get them to work to always bring listeners back to the on-air and your website for personal connection to your brand.
7. Be consistent. Don?t you love those competitors who start a project and do it for a couple of months and then it falls off completely. You see this in blogging all the time. Last post: October 7, 2009. Who?s reading their stuff? No one. Make sure you stay consistent and reward your participating staff from time to time. It can be as simple as dinner for two at a nice local place or tickets to the movies. Give it to them with a personal note and make your praise public about their quality of content, visuals, and consistency so the other team members can see it.
8. Finally, let the entire staff see your commitment to social media and that it is a priority of the management and ownership. If you mirror to staff that this is important and remain consistent in showing them it is important in generating local participation, then ratings -- and then revenue (which are exactly the specific lanes of your business that can be impacted by having a great social media content strategy and an overall digital strategy) -- your social media will take off and grow, grow, grow.
Loyd Ford is the direct marketing, ratings and social media strategist for Americalist Direct Marketing and has programmed very successful radio brands in markets of all sizes, including KRMD AM & FM in Shreveport, and WSSL and WMYI in Greenville, WKKT in Charlotte and WBEE in Rochester, NY. Learn more about Loyd here: http://about.me/loydford. Get his radio-social media content sent directly to your smart phone or email for free here: www.rainmakerpathway.wordpress.com. Reach out to Loyd via e-mail HERE. Visit his Facebook radio social media page HERE.
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