What other advice would you have for marketing leaders when it comes to creating a social presence?

[shaownhasan]

You always have to have that balance between quantitative and qualitative data with any kind of social reporting. It’s really tough in any aspect of marketing to not fall into paralysis by analysis.

Don’t overcomplicate it. Go back to your loan data gut belief. Give it more time, or do another test to see if you get similar results or make some tweaks for the next piece of similar content.

For the Steve Burns campaign, we had a lot of quantitative metrics we were tracking, but the validation and success of the campaign really came from the qualitative metrics, primarily the comments, shares and the sentiment within those comments and shares.

I’d be lying to you if I said prior to the campaign launching that we didn’t ask ourselves the questions, “Is this too much? Is this going to land with our audience?” But what gave us that boost of certainty we needed was sharing the creative with all of Flock’s teams to get feedback, and of course leadership was one of those teams. I wish I was in those executive leadership team meetings when our chief marketing officer was sharing the scripts and then ultimately the final videos. It would have been great content capturing those conversations and reactions.

People who are in social media leadership positions have been in the game for a long time and they all started somewhere. They started on Instagram, Vine and Facebook for companies in the early days.

As you level up, you start to get more removed from the trenches. Social customer care, community management and social in general are changing every single day. Features, trends, how to leverage platforms—don’t remove yourself from those trenches, or else social media is going to leave you behind.