The Background

While RICS had built up a successful social media community, without thorough processes, policies, or structures in place, the organisation had amassed over 170 different social accounts across the globe. There was little oversight of social activity and no way to ensure outbound content was on-brand which posed a risk to the brand’s reputation.

The benefits of social media were well understood, but social had become more of a risk than an asset. To rectify the situation, the Community & Social Media team performed a thorough audit of all social media assets and how they were performing against the organisation’s objectives, recognising they needed a more strategic approach to handling social media output.

The Challenges

• Gain full visibility over all social media activity, globally.
• Ensure consistent and on-brand content is shared across all corporate social media profiles.
• Allow other members of the organisation beyond the UK marketing team to get involved with social media in a safe way.
• Better utilise social media as a channel to engage with each of the organisation’s distinct audiences and create targeted content.
• Establish a reporting process to ensure social media delivers against the organisation’s objectives.

 In a nutshell

“We recognised that we’d scaled our social media accounts up too quickly and we needed to reign it back in. We started by listening for mentions of our brand and understanding how each of our accounts were used.”

From there, the team were able to reduce the number of social media accounts it owned, and put a structure in place so that marketing colleagues located in each regional office could access and create content for their local social media channels, while enabling the UK team to act as the strategic lead.

“To support this structure, minimise risk, and crucially give us visibility over activity on social media we needed software. We looked at 3 tools and our priority was to find one that was easy for all of our users to get on board with, regardless of their level of social media experience.”

“SoCrowd was the perfect fit because access to functionality can be tailored to the needs of each individual and it’s easy and simple for everyone to use.”

“At RICS, social media experience varies across our geographies and so we were looking for a tool that could help us bring everyone to the same point. We didn’t want something like Sprinklr because it’s overcomplicated for users that aren’t pure social media managers.”

 How we got here

Once RICS started using SoCrowd they were able to adopt a more joined-up approach to social media activity resulting in a more consistent experience for their community.

“We’re able to see everything under one roof that we couldn’t previously and as a result our social media activity is measurable. We can empower colleagues to get involved with social media at RICS because we can moderate content before it’s made live, making sure that we’ve got a consistent, on brand, and co-ordinated approach to social media”.

The team have also been able to optimise their digital projects, making it an easy and seamless process to manage, monitor, and report on campaigns where social media plays an active role.

“Our largest annual event is the World Built Environment Forum which is a perfect example of how social media allows us to run global campaigns from one central point. We can ensure consistency across our channels, and accurately measure the output of our efforts which in this case is registrations. All the work we do in marketing including social media needs to show an impact against our objectives.”

“We also know that people buy for lots of different reasons, and social media allows us to target different audiences with different content that is most relevant and interesting for them. We have our internal network of members who we know really well, but we have little contact with people outside of our database so social media allows us to engage them with the most appropriate message and content.”

Besides optimising their use of social media, the team at RICS have unlocked further return on investment with SoCrowd.

“In terms of content creation, we’ve seen a great improvement in the quality and quantity of content that we’re producing. It’s easier and faster to create high quality content because we have a process and can collaborate on planning. The fact that there’s full visibility over all activity also means that everyone in the organisation is held accountable to their objectives”.

“For me, it’s scheduling that’s provided the greatest transformation to our activity. We no longer have to log into lots of different social media accounts. We had free Hootsuite and the 20 tweet limit was just killing our effectiveness. One of the upcoming campaigns we have involves sending 700 tweets across a number of targeted audiences and without a tool like SoCrowd that just wouldn’t be possible.”

Alongside creating content, and driving engagement, the team at RICS are able to assess the impact their work has on business objectives. Previously, there was no reporting process, it was more of a tick box exercise but raising the understanding of the impact that social media has allowed the team to change this attitude.

“When people can understand and interpret that data they can better make decisions about future content and learn from their experiences. This is one of the major changes that we’ve seen in terms of how social media is perceived at RICS.”

“If you’re looking to do more with social media in your organisation like us, my advice would be to make sure you identify your audiences! Find out where they hang out, what they’re interested in, and how they like to consume information. The quicker you can understand someone the faster you can move them down your marketing funnel by creating content targeted for them. This is super important – particularly when you have a large diverse audience like us!”

“With regards to preparing your business for a project like this – do an audit of your social media assets and focus on how they do or don’t help you to achieve your business objectives.”

“Looking to the future, once we’re confident that we’ve got consistency in our organic content, our next focus will be on expanding our use of paid social media. As we have so many different departments it can be easy to each target the same audiences on social media, so we need a co-ordinated process to ensure that our cost per click doesn’t increase because we’re fighting for the same audience.”

Later down the line RICS predict that more and more of their professional members will want to communicate with them on social media and preparing for that is key. So, establishing a process for social media customer service is the organisation’s longer-term aim to satisfy the changing needs of their audiences!

Result!

• Effectively targeted each of the organisation’s diverse audiences with tailor-made relevant social media content to achieve business objectives.
• Built a combined global social media community of over 254k followers across multiple social networks.
• Achieved efficiencies and improved productivity in creating content for social media across the organisation.
• Gained full visibility to ensure global brand consistency and better co-ordination between departments and teams.
• Empowered colleagues from across the organisation to better utilise social media as training, support, processes and software are in place to ensure the individual and the organisation is protected.
• Established a robust reporting process to communicate social media outcomes.

See why hundreds of brands use SoCrowd
to get more results from social media.