Telecom website social brand benchmarking

Telecom companies can use social media to engage new B2B contacts and energize existing customers.

As a starting point it is a good idea to do an initial influencer analysis to understand the key themes of the industry's online conversation in social media and search. An influencer analysis will help brand managers and marketers understand who is driving the conversion online. The list could include competitors, analysts, bloggers, journalists, service providers, customers and industry professionals.

Define your social brand benchmark

1. Content analysis. Understand what kinds of content are appropriate for your brand, industry, customers and prospects. Document the types of content used by competitors. Define the kinds of content that helps influence the marketplace. (See below for examples)
2. Social channel. Understand where your competitors are currently engaging prospects online. Define the publishing schedule, types of messages and the engagement the messages are receiving. Use social monitoring tools to measure social content engagement.

In order to make social media marketing efforts more successful for a telecom brand, it is vital to create a benchmark document in order receive proper buy-in from other executive team members, investors and leadership team members. Many of these teams may not immediately understand how social media marketing applies to the telecom industry and what roles social media may play in the marketing of a telecom brand. A few of the roles may include:

• Brand visibility & awareness
• Lead generation by announcing offers and driving towards trials, demos or content
• Customer service
• Marketplace intelligence
• Search ranking increasing (social & SEO)
• Marketing cost reduction
• Sales and lead nurturing
• PR

Example content types to employ within social marketing

These content types can be used within social media or within the telecom brand website to capture the attention of prospects, leads and customers to drive meaningful interactions and engagements.

• Social network posts
• Sponsored posts (paid visibility)
• Blogs
• Webinars
• Forums & Niche networking groups (Linkedin)
• Data presentations
• Slides & distributed slide shows
• Audio & podcasts
• Video (industry-insider, demos, instructionals, etc
• Search & SEO
• Wikis
• Email  -  email marketing for lead nurturing and customer engagement
• Whitepapers, factsheets, reports
• Surveys and survey findings
• Infographics & images
• Interactive tours (HTML5 web demos and presentations)
• Micro-sites
• Micro-blogging (Twitter)
• Customer support forums or member websites