/ Applying the 80/20 rule to Social Media

Applying the 80/20 Rule to Social Media

In all honesty, I think we are all still figuring out how to harness the power of social media, but here are a few activities that I have seen make an impact.

  •  Leverage your CEO.  A CEO with a strong social presence, in an authentic voice, can be the most effective weapon in your arsenal.  A survey by Chadwick Martin Bailey states that 50% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company after following their tweets.  As an example, Josh James, Domo’s CEO, has many social media followers and just one tweet from him can drive tens of thousands of unique visitors to a piece of content.  But not every marketer is as lucky as me with his or her CEO.  In fact, a recent survey from CEO.com found that only 3.8% of the F500 CEOs were on Twitter.

So how can you leverage your CEO socially?  My advice is to make sure his / her voice is authentic.  In a discussion with one of my mentors, a F500 CMO, he made the decision not to create and publish social content (tweets, etc.) for his CEO.  He would rather his CEO have no social presence than something that sounded phony.  Good call.

  •  Encourage social behavior across the entire team.  You will be shocked at what you learn.  At Domo, we instituted a mandatory, employee-wide, social experiment.  Every employee had to earn 30 “social” badges.  I found some real nuggets:  The shy executive assistant that sits outside my office has a great voice for blogging.  The quirky engineer I see in the lunchroom has a huge following on Twitter and Github.  And the benefits keep pouring in.  As an example, we’ve developed product features that are the result of engineers using new social tools. We’ve also implemented a new Domo tweeting strategy based on personal Twitter successes.
  • Use data to evaluate everything.  As we are still in discovery mode on what works and what doesn’t, data makes my job a lot easier.  I use our own product to look daily at dashboards measuring the results of our social efforts.  I can quickly kill an initiative that doesn’t appear to be delivering results.  Data-driven decision-making is helping me achieve the 80/20 rule in social media.

We are still refining our social media approach. I hope to find the “golden egg”, but until then, I am just striving to accomplish the 80/20 rule.

Tags: social media

Try Domo now.

Watch a demo.