As a communications brand, Verizon has millions of customers and fans in business-to-business and retail markets. Each audience represents a wide range of opportunities and challenges when it comes to social media.
In her recent BlogWell presentation, Verizon’s Laurie Shook shared how the company developed its social-media strategy, how it’s training teams and how it’s creating content that’s driving engagement. A few of her big points:
- Create a team that departments can turn to for social-media guidance. About a year ago, Verizon experienced a surge of internal interest in social media. Rather than blocking all of these ideas, they created a cross-departmental steering team to offer guidance, training and support.
- Specific content beats generalized content. Shook explained how the company has found that publications built around specific topics drive significantly more engagement (and earn more fans) than publications around more general issues — even when the general publications come with fancier design and more bells and whistles.
- You don’t define your social property’s conversation — your customers do. When Verizon set up a unified Facebook page designed for people to ask questions and then be directed elsewhere, they quickly realized the conversation was dominated by Verizon Wireless discussions. They then took this natural fan behavior back to the drawing board to create specific Facebook strategies for each division.
And if you like this presentation, be sure to check out our upcoming BlogWell in Philadelphia on Nov. 9.