Are you roaming the ever-changing social landscape without a map? Facebook and Instagram and Pinterest, oh my! The first part of our Clean Up Your Social Landscape blog offered tips on tackling your company’s overgrown social presence.

We helped you clean up. Now, let’s venture into the dry, cracked desert of channels long ignored to cultivate your social landscape.

Get the Fertilizer

You jumped into social media for your business, starting with the standard three channels: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Everybody uses Facebook. Everyone has a Twitter account. LinkedIn is a no-brainer. You posted your first post, your second, but where was the engagement? You asked questions, used polls, but where was the reach? You planted the seed, but nothing grew.

The Right Channels

Posting a poll to your Facebook page about which color of your product customers like best won’t work if the people who like your Facebook page are your employees.

Not only do you need to know who your existing social audience is, but you also need to figure out where your target audience is on social. Facebook is full of employees? Great. Try finding leads on LinkedIn. Twitter isn’t getting any love? Try posting your latest product colors on Instagram.

Industry is a factor, too. B2C companies might see greater engagement using customer-focused channels with built-in ad platforms: Facebook, Instagram and SnapChat. B2B companies might use Twitter to share news and events to get in front of journalists and trade publications, but then turn to LinkedIn to collect and nurture leads. Plant the seed where your audience is, not where you think they are.

Time and Resources

It won’t matter that you’ve chosen the plot of land where your audience is waiting to see what blooms if you don’t have the time and resources needed to cultivate it.

Marketing teams get leaner every year. The person who was once your webmaster now also manages your blog, email marketing, newsletter and social media. As technologies evolve, so does your team. But your team doesn’t always grow. Wear too many hats, and you might lose one. That one is usually social media.

Faced with emailing your loyal customers about a just-for-them offer and coming up with something to tweet… well, we’d pick the email, too.

We had a client who came to us with all the talent to activate social for lead generation and public relations, but not an ounce of time left in the day to post. We audited their content and resources, categorizing everything for ease of immediate use, and alleviated the stress of planning what to say when. Passing the cultivation over to us allowed our client to bloom.

Social Advertising

Your business might be brand new and, therefore, brand new to social media. It won’t matter how engaging your content is, how dedicated your social media manager is or how often you tweet if you don’t have an audience.

Today, the social media landscape is pay-to-play. Advertising gets your channels in front of an audience. With advanced targeting, you can get in front of the exact audience you want – your customers, potential employees or the media.

Clean It Up

Cultivate your own landscape with these tips:

• Do your research. Make sure you’re activating social channels your audience uses.
• Adjust your content to talk to the audience you want. Think: Employees are on Facebook; customers are on LinkedIn.
• Hire a dedicated person or team to manage your social media. Put time and resources into your strategy to see return.
• Boost your organic social with advertising. Build your audience or sell your products, but make sure you’re visible.

Click here to contact us if you need help cultivating your social plot to get your channels in front of the right audience. Our support comes in a variety of levels. Ad hoc, supplemental or full-service, we’ve got you covered.

Social media are ever-changing. Legacy channels update services. New channels appear and popularize or disappear faster than the next season of your favorite sitcom. How do you keep up? Companies come to us with social landscapes wildly overgrown or – more often – deeply neglected. Does one describe you?

Don’t worry. Hope is not lost – and neither is access to that long-forgotten Facebook page. Let’s look at how to clean up your social landscape whether it’s too tangled to get through or in need of some serious TLC.

Welcome to the Jungle

Has your company created as many social channels as networks exist to maintain the latest and greatest social experiences? Have company silos bred duplicate Twitter accounts, Facebook and LinkedIn pages? Are you up to your ears in notifications?

Too Many Channels

Do you use the standard three social channels: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn? These three rightfully have their place in your lineup because of their wide adoption.

But what about the other five or eight you’re trying to juggle? Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr and Pinterest all serve different purposes, even if they serve the same audiences.

If you can’t answer what Instagram does for your company, why are you using it? If you find yourself struggling to create content for these channels or don’t know what purpose they serve, strike them from your strategy and revisit them again when the time is right.

Duplicate Channels

Duplicate channels are far worse for your business than juggling (and dropping) too many. Duplicates confuse your audience, disrupt your search optimization and prevent you from engaging with users who are using a Facebook page or Twitter account you don’t have access to.

Most of the time, duplicate channels are born from silos.

Example: Your remote sales team wants to talk about a last-minute offer on social, but they’re not connected to the marketing team at HQ. Sales takes matters into their own hands and – pop! – one rogue Facebook page after another is populated with two or three posts, and then left to dry up.

Changes to privacy and security settings throughout the social landscape have made it more difficult for someone to come in, claim and deduplicate your channels. Even if that someone is you.

Claiming an unmanaged Facebook page is fairly simple. Click here to see the steps. You’ll just need some paperwork. Claiming a managed page, however, isn’t easy.

We had a client who came to us without admin access to their Facebook page. We hunted for days for the admin, working back and forth with Facebook’s support team – who wouldn’t just give us the name. Getting access to Twitter and LinkedIn was just as hard.

Imagine trying to find which smartphone has the Snapchat credentials.

Clean It Up

Untangle your landscape with these tips:

• Write a social media policy and enforce it. Click here to read ours. Who represents your company on social? Hint: Not everyone. Not anyone. Just one person, team, department, etc.
• Create social channels you need based on your strategy and audience – and no more. Every product doesn’t need its own Facebook page.
• Search Google for your business and “Facebook,” “Twitter” and “LinkedIn,” etc. to find all the possible duplicate channels clogging your landscape.
• Username and passwords are easier to have than to find. Admin access is better to have than to get. Know who has access to these channels, and make sure you do, too.

If you need help finding and jumping through the countless hoops social networks put in the way of you getting access to your accounts, contact us. We’ve been there. We’ve got the scars to prove it.