Executing a Social Media Exit Strategy

Photo courtesy of xomiele

It’s a fact of life. Everything comes to an end sooner or later. The same goes for social media campaigns and accounts. The trick is knowing when to pull the plug and move on to something bigger and better.

One of the biggest reasons to hit the delete button is to avoid a social media time suck that drains budget resources and doesn’t provide a healthy return on your investment. You also may find that the property has exceeded its shelf life and you’re not generating optimal levels of traffic and engagement anymore. Whatever the reason, you’re now faced with the decision of what to do.

Obviously, you’ll need to consider the platform carefully. Whether it’s a blog, community, microsite or social networking account, each will have its own factors to consider. But once you put an end to that social media fossil, chances are you’ll find more time and energy to focus on something new. The guilt and baggage from those dated social media accounts will free you to do more. So here are a few things to consider.

Dead Blogs and Communities Serve Up SEO Benefits

If you decide that it doesn’t make sense to sustain your blog, don’t delete it without careful consideration. Blogs, and online communities for that matter, are fantastic repositories of knowledge and opinion for readers seeking out specific content. Depending upon the subject matter, they could yield a wealth of information for many, many years. More than likely, your posts and the reader comments are attracting a fair amount of visitors on a regular basis. You may find that much of the content is still valuable and people are coming across it through their online searches and via your SEO efforts. Check your analytics to determine the level of traffic that’s still coming to the blog, as well as where your visitors are coming from (referral traffic) and the search terms they’re using to find your blog or community. This data could certainly help you shape future marketing strategies or even help you plan your next blog. Make sure you draft and publish a final post explaining the reason for the termination of the blog or online community and thank your readers/contributors for their participation. Don’t forget to include a link they can click to find your organization online, join an affiliate community or a recommended group on a social network like Facebook or LinkedIn.

Expired Campaign Microsites Leverage Inbound Links

Your company may have built an online destination with a very specific purpose in mind. These microsites are usually tied to a creative campaign to drive visibility around a product or service, promote an event, or may even have been used to hold a contest or sweepstakes of some kind. Even though the product has been discontinued, the event has passed or the contest has ended, you may still be attracting visitors from inbound links. Again, it’s about taking advantage of that web traffic (and your brand equity) so don’t cut off that funnel of interested visitors wanting to know more about your organization. Go ahead and tear down the site (make sure you archive your digital assets) but hang onto the domain URL (those are super inexpensive and worth the cost if it means generating an additional stream of traffic). Use a website redirect to your new campaign site, social media page or official web property to connect them with content that’s current. Of course, if you’re not generating traffic than it won’t make sense to keep the domain name. Hit the delete button on the whole thing.

Unattended Social Media Accounts Aren’t Exactly Social

It’s disappointing to come across a business account on a social network that’s been abandoned or doesn’t respond to comments or customer inquiries. Of course, there could be several reasons for this such as budget cuts, inexperienced community managers or a poor social media strategy (brand conversation monitoring is required for all social media programs). Unlike blogs and online communities, social networks operate on a real-time basis. They are meant to provide ongoing dialogue and can become stale and out-of-date rather quickly. If that’s the case, an exit strategy is probably needed.

I wouldn’t recommend deleting brand name accounts on social networks. I’m talking about branded vanity URLs such as pinterest.com/KLMConsulting. While it’s common for businesses to quickly jump onto social networks to secure their brand names (before cyber squatters beat them), the accounts shouldn’t resemble a ghost town with tumble weeds either. If you’re not ready to activate the account, try to make it hidden (Facebook allows you to do that with pages and groups). If you can’t do that, why not post an initial message stating the obvious – “Thanks for visiting our page, we’ll be launching shortly so come back soon!” If it’s a mature page and you’ll only be gone temporarily, then state that in the last post you publish or in the profile. At the very least this sets the tone and shows your commitment to transparent communications. It also tells the visitor that there is some strategy being developed behind closed doors.

Research from Burson-Marsteller cited that the average number of social media accounts is 33 per company. If you have secondary pages that aren’t performing or you simply can’t sustain or maintain the dialogue, then you may want to consider deleting those. Frankly, they could be doing you more harm than good. Most likely, these will be social media accounts that aren’t imperative to your business and do not contain your brand name in the vanity URL. If that’s the case, you’ll want to send a message to your fans or subscribers letting them know the end is near. Just do so with caution since social media accounts cannot be undeleted.

Personalized Social Networks Help Solve Privacy Issues

Photo courtesy of Exey Panteleev

An interesting thing is happening online, we’re moving towards personalized social networks. The newest feature among the top social networks is the ability to organize your friends, family and work colleagues into separate, meaningful communities. When you think about it, being able to send selective content to a pre-defined group of contacts is a great way to solve the online privacy issues we’ve been facing for so long.

Historically, Twitter and Facebook have allowed members to group friends and followers into lists for the sole purpose of tracking updates. For example, you can set up a list of business colleagues and track their updates. But what if you wanted to send a customized message only to that list of people? Not possible. Er, ok, it was possible on Facebook but not easy. It wasn’t until earlier this year that people really got excited about customized contact lists when Google introduced Circles as part of the Google+ platform. Google+ members are able to set up personalized lists or “circles” of their contacts based on relationship and send customized status updates and/or messages to them. Talk about a major step forward in selective content distribution.

This week, Facebook upgraded its “Lists” feature to allow members to organize friends and send specific message to them. To help familiarize members with the concept, Facebook has created three generic “Smart” lists for every profile: 1) close friends, 2) acquaintances, and 3) restricted. The idea is to segment out your good friends from people you work with or may not know intimately. Of course you also create your own lists and call them whatever you like. A common complaint I’ve heard from dozens of colleagues over the last few years has been, “How do I balance my personal life with my professional life on Facebook?” With Facebook Lists, you can be selective with the content you distribute and control who actually sees it. Problem solved. Privacy advocates should be jumping for joy.

Dan Zarella Offers Tips for Maximizing Twitter

I recently listened to an insightful webinar featuring Dan Zarrella, Social Media Scientist at HubSpot. To my surprise, Marketing legend, Seth Godin was on the line to introduce Dan and informed us that he was the author of the most popular e-book in the world. I thought that was pretty impressive. Dan took the microphone and began his talk about the viral nature of online content and the behavior of sharing.

Dan’s area of study is memetics or memes as coined by Richard Dawkins. He talked about content being “contagious” and how that results in people wanting to share it. Overall, there are three drivers of viral success: 1) Exposure (the act of following and friending on social networks), 2) Attention (the consuming of content) and 3) Motivation (clicking/taking an action).

Dan put these concepts into context by using Twitter as the platform for his research. Based on his in-depth analysis, Dan offered some great tips for maximizing Twitter with greater success.

Sharing content on Twitter in the form of links drives more followers than engaging in conversation
Define yourself and tell people why they should listen to you (use terms like official, founder, speaker, and expert in your profile)
Self-reference doesn’t always attract new followers, don’t talk about yourself too much, instead focus on the subject
Negative content turns off people and it won’t be shared – they want positive content
Research shows that people with more followers on Twitter are less conversational because they tend to broadcast more
Friday, Sat and Sun are bad days to publish unless you want to bury your story
Use verbs in your tweets since are more powerful than adjectives and are more shareable
Asking readers to “Please RT” actually works – on average it will generate 4x more retweets

Dan did a great job and I urge you to view his Science of Social Media 2011 presentation and transcript for yourself.