Socialbakers’ Engage 2013 Conference, will be held November 21st in New York City.  We interviewed Jan Rezab, CEO of Socialbakers, about some of the main topics that will be discussed at the upcoming event.

What would be your advice in creating the best social content for a brand’s social marketing strategy?

In order to create the best content for your company, brands should first, listen to your audience.  By observing and analyzing how your fans are speaking about your product or service, you can determine which factors are most important and make adjustments accordingly.  By understanding how your audience views your product, you can create customer-centric campaigns that will bolster a brand philosophy that your audience will support.

You should also monitor your competitors closely, follow their Pages and feeds to observe how they engage their audience, what types of posts they create and when they decide to post, what offers they may provide, and any other marketing activities they carry out. By monitoring their Pages, you can learn how to target your audience more effectively or generate new ideas on how to communicate your brand to social media users.

And your opinion on Social Advertising and Segmentation?

Social advertising is a crucial facet of your marketing campaigns.  It is important to target audiences when creating ad campaigns, optimize reach, infiltrate a demographic that best identifies with your brand, and simply get the best bang out of your buck.

When looking at social media marketing as a whole, how important, would you say, is social customer care?

Of course we stand by our claim that social is not about one metric, it’s about all of them.  However, social customer care is pivotal when creating an effective social presence.  In fact we introduced Socially Devoted as an industry standard last year in order to measure the top performing brands in social care.  Since then we’ve been impressed and excited to see that brands are also understanding the importance creating two-way communication with customers over various platforms, responding to questions, and doing so in a timely manner.

What are the best practices for managing a social care team?

There are some importance practices, such as setting short, mid and long term goals and measure your improvement over time. You must also set some guidelines for your team.

Most importantly, brands need to invest in the resources and have a properly trained response team, especially if the page functions as a CRM tool.  If you operate in multiple markets, you may find yourself working across several time zones. This means considering the option of a 24/7 social media team.  Your social media team will also need support from other areas of your business such as the technical team, product development and CRM. Make sure your team has easy access to the right people in the relevant departments who can help them quickly resolve issues.