Social media is among the most powerful marketing tools available to your business. It’s accessible, offers significant reach, and can be cost-effective. When utilized strategically, you can encourage impactful engagement with your consumers.
Not to mention, it can be instrumental in raising your profile in the industry and bolstering your company’s expertise within its field.
But it’s important to remember that leveraging social media to its full potential isn’t just about focusing on the efforts of your marketing team. As with so many other areas of business, a solid collaboration between departments can help your social media campaigns reach their full potential.
We’re going to take a moment to look at the impact of interdepartmental communication on your social media campaigns.
What are the benefits of interdepartmental communication? What actions should your company take to make social media campaigns more collaborative?
Creating Unity
At its core, interdepartmental communication is a tool for company unity in the face of the different tasks and priorities within each section of your business. When your protocols and techniques enable smooth communication, there are fewer opportunities for misunderstandings and conflicts to arise.
This mitigates risk while also providing a sense of clarity for everyone involved. Under these circumstances, the disparate sections of your business can move together in a common direction toward success.
This unification can positively impact your social campaigns. It helps to ensure there’s a consistent and accurate representation of the company. One of the dangers of a solely marketing-based approach is there may be elements of company culture, values, or activities that aren’t effectively expressed.
This isn’t necessarily because your marketing professionals haven’t done their due diligence in terms of research. Rather, it’s more that each department has valuable insights to offer.
When various departments have opportunities to communicate about campaigns, there is a chance to create representations the majority of employees agree on.
This is also important when a campaign is intended to introduce new products, raise awareness of different resources, or even promote the brand identity on social platforms.
These aspects are the product of multiple contributors. When there are opportunities for everyone to communicate on the subject matter being presented clearly and easily, a unified vision can be achieved.
Fostering Collaboration
Good collaboration is at the heart of every successful business. Unless your departments and individual employees can function effectively as a team, there is a danger of projects failing and productivity grinding to a halt.
Interdepartmental communication is one of the most important tools to foster collaboration. Even when all department members essential to a project can’t be in the same room, effective communication protocols ensure everyone can contribute meaningfully.
This is important in social media because all departments have a role to play in a campaign’s success. Remember, simply having a large number of followers is less important than creating posts that garner social engagement.
A key consideration here revolves around creating content that is valuable to audiences and relevant to the users of each specific platform. It’s also important to interact meaningfully with your followers when they respond to posts on all of your platforms
Good interdepartmental communication can help marketing departments establish which members of staff have the right experiences and perspectives to collaborate on niche posts. It also means marketers can quickly get information from relevant departments, enabling them to reply to followers with the best information promptly.
Communication between departments can also be vital when it comes to collaborative-efficacy assessments throughout the campaign. Marketing professionals can provide other departments with insights into content and ideas that seem to be failing to connect with consumers.
Collaborators from different departments can then provide their thoughts on why certain elements may not be clear with suggestions for improvements.
Bolstering Transparency
Transparency is a vital aspect of all businesses today. When there are literal or figurative walls shielding departments’ activities, discord can grow within a company.
This is particularly true when it comes to business leadership and executives. One recent report found that just 14% of employees trust their chief executive officers (CEOs) and senior management.
Transparency can help to demonstrate leaders aren’t concealing anything or behaving unethically. Good interdepartmental communication is a valuable tool to break down walls and bolster transparency.
How does this translate to social media campaigns? Primarily, it ensures all departments have equal access to data generated by posts. Everyone has a chance to receive information about what followers and responders are saying about specific departments or the company as a whole.
This has been especially prevalent when it comes to company ethics concerning social causes — such as the Black Lives Matter movement, where followers have been quick to respond when businesses’ posts and their actions haven’t aligned.
Importantly, this transparency can then be a tool for accountability. Clear interdepartmental communication can make certain all staff gain information about management or executive perspectives on the issues consumers have raised about the company or the ideas posted.
It also means that there are opportunities for management to set expectations for changes based on the information received as a response to campaigns.
Embracing Diverse Perspectives
Research has found that diverse perspectives can drive innovation and strengthen the culture of a company. Unfortunately, this tends not to be the case unless your diverse contributors can voice their opinions.
This is where proper interdepartmental communication can play another vital role. It helps to ensure that your company benefits from the ideas, insights, and perspectives of the full range of its talented contributors.
In social media campaigns, interdepartmental communication can be instrumental in making certain the tone, content, and intention of campaigns are at their most effective. This is especially important if your marketing department is not as diverse as your business as a whole.
Communication protocols can ensure staff from various backgrounds can quickly inform social media teams when aspects may be problematic or opportunities to connect with different cultures may have been missed.
Diverse perspectives can be helpful, too, when a campaign hinges on communicating complex or new ideas to audiences.
The department introducing a fresh product or service may be able to provide information to marketing departments from the perspective of their technical expertise.
However, sharing this content between other departments before posting can help social media marketers understand whether the concepts are clear to those without any expertise in the area.
All departments can then work together on finding language and images that resonate with the target demographic.
Understanding Different Priorities
Each department has not only its own tasks but also its priorities. These may not always mesh even within a single project. Solid interdepartmental communication can mean everyone gets a better opportunity to understand one another’s needs and interact in a more agile manner.
From a social media perspective, this can help to make campaigns more efficient. When marketing departments can understand other staff members’ tasks, priorities, and timelines, they can better plan for the campaign.
This may be about arranging meetings that work for everyone or fitting content creation by expert staff members into a schedule. Communicating clearly about these priorities and workflows makes certain everyone can contribute meaningfully without marketing seeming like a burden.
Good communication can also mean marketing departments can better understand other departments’ thematic, practical, and emotional priorities related to the campaign.
They get to understand what messages need to be communicated to consumers — and how the entire company feels these messages should be represented.
Identifying New Opportunities
One of the dangers of each department operating in isolation is there is little chance to share potentially valuable information. The activities in one department may present vital opportunities for others.
For instance, if the legal department discovers potential upcoming legislation being passed, good interdepartmental communication can ensure that affected departments make early changes.
In this way, communication has directly mitigated the potential for disruption.
Similarly, interdepartmental communication can raise awareness of time-sensitive, current events that may affect social media campaigns.
Marketing professionals may have some well-researched ideas about the content and methods that are generally trending at the moment.
However, other departments may have professional insights into what users connected to their industries are likely to gravitate toward at any given time. These staff members may even be able to provide greater insights into new influencers making waves in their field.
Similarly, marketing professionals get to communicate new opportunities to other departments. Responses to social media posts may show demand for different types of services or new products.
Interdepartmental communication can mean this data gets passed and empower the relevant departments to create innovative solutions that result in company growth.
Conclusion
Interdepartmental communication has a variety of advantageous applications in business, many of which translate to social media campaigns.
When professionals in different fields can share information and discuss their perspectives, marketing departments get to benefit from greater collaboration and actionable, niche insights from experts.
Other departments in turn also have opportunities to learn from social media marketers about the needs of the public and varied perspectives on the company.
Social media in itself is a valuable communication tool. It makes sense for all departments to collaborate to maximize its benefits.
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