Inside BCI’s Social Strategy for SMX — SEM Synergy Extras

Is your organization’s social media engagement at the level you’d like it to be? That was the question we asked in our Facebook Question of the Week. Some great examples came up in the conversation of how businesses are using social media, and how they’d like to advance their interaction in the future.

It’s conversations like those that we were hoping to generate when we introduced the Question of the Week to our Facebook fan page. To be honest, it doesn’t matter how many Facebook marketing webinars and conference presentations I’ve attended — I always sought a greater understanding of how Facebook can work for business.

In a blog post on Monday, I wrote about how social media continues to evolve: “One of the trickier characteristics of social media is that it will continue to change, and users and businesses will adapt to the change in order to use it to its full potential.” In a comment on that post, BCI BFF Lisa Barone shared a post by social media smarty Justin Kownacki that proposes ways businesses can improve their social media efficacy.

One of his suggestions is to unlink social media channels “so that each one has merit unto itself.” So, instead of posting the same content to Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc., make each channel have a unique angle or offering. It makes perfect sense, as personally, I don’t like reading the same thing each time I check into a different social network. So when the BCI team sat down to architect our social media strategy for SMX West next week, we thought about how we could use each of our social channels so they shine doing what they’re best at.

On today’s episode of SEM Synergy, guest Shannon Poole and I spoke about Bruce Clay, Inc.’s plans for the blog and Twitter during SMX next week. We shared our strategy for using social media for business development because we thought it might be useful to other organizations working toward similar goals. So what are we going to do with social media while at SMX West?

On Twitter, follow @shannonpoole, @virginianussey (that’s me!) and @bruceclayinc for postings on what Shannon, Bruce and I are up to at the show. The company account will be updated with links to the liveblog posts along with Bruce’s whereabouts. Shannon will be monitoring Twitter for mentions of the brand in order to reply to interested tweeps as quickly as possible.

I’ll be doing my best to tweet the best quotable nuggets I hear from presenters. Also, I’ll be using our Facebook channel to host my SMX West photo journal. (I don’t know about you, but Facebook has become a photo gallery for me.) And we hope to get more traction from our liveblog posts by quickly notifying speakers mentioned in them in the hopes that those speakers might share the post with their own followers.

We’re trying to use the strengths of each social media channel. For Twitter, it’s speed; for the blog, it’s long-form content sharing; and on Facebook, it’s interactions on a visually oriented network. Our marketing strategies are evolving along with the platforms themselves. Are you engaged in social media at the level you’d like to be? Let us know on our Facebook Question of the Week!

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.