4 Ways Brands Can Correctly Quality Control Social Media

Today, brands need to be active on social media. Social media can help companies build brand awareness and gain new customers. In fact, seventy-six percent of U.S. consumers have purchased a product they saw in a brand’s social media post.

However, multi-location businesses need to quality control their local social media efforts. Not doing so can turn off potential and current customers or lead to a PR crisis. Here are four ways to strategically and efficiently quality control your brand’s social media.

1. Have Clear Voice, Tone, and Brand Guidelines

Having company-wide voice, tone, and brand guidelines for social media will inherently help with quality assurance. These guidelines can serve as a reference point anytime an employee posts on a local or corporate social media account. These guidelines will also help your brand maintain consistency across your social media channels, while also helping to ensure you’re delivering your main message correctly.

2. Create a Chain of Command

You need more than one set of eyes on each piece of social media content before it’s published. Having multiple people review a social media post drastically reduces errors or brand inconsistencies. Anyone reviewing social media content should be conscious of these common mistakes:

• Grammatical errors
• Scheduled for the correct time and date
• Call to action or UTM links work
• Follows style guidelines

One way to help quality control social media is to use social media management software that allows you to manage your social efforts across locations. SOCi’s social media management solution does exactly this. It enables you to plan and schedule content across multiple social media platforms. It also allows multi-location businesses to manage and deploy localized content at scale while adhering to brand guidelines at both the enterprise and local levels.

3. Respond Professionally

Sometimes, customers will use social media to contact customer service or make a complaint. Others might write negative comments. Regardless of what’s said, make sure that you reply using the PTP method: professional, timely, and positive.

In your social media guidelines and strategy, it’s best to include a section on how to respond to various comments and messages. Consider who’s responsible for replying to comments, who vets these replies before posting them, and how to prioritize responses.

4. Provide a Value Add and CTA

Increasing customer engagement and acquiring more leads should be part of your social media strategy. Thus, most social media posts should add value to your core or targeted audience. This value could be general tips related to your business or notifying clients of a new product update with a link to a tutorial. 

Most of your social media posts, especially those in paid digital campaigns, should have a call to action (CTA) that helps to place your target audience somewhere within your marketing funnel. You should be able to measure CTA engagements via a UTM or other trackable link.

For more tips on how to implement quality control to your local social efforts across locations, learn how  SOCi can help.