So it just so happens that my housemate is a Digital Marketer. I can't tell you her name or who she works for (social media policy and all) except that it is a fairly succesful Australian retailer.
The interview went something like this...
AP: So how long have you been a Digital Marketer for?
So and So: I have been a digital marketer for the past three years but I've been working with websites for maybe the past five
AP: And have you always used social media in that role?
SS: In my current role, so for the last three years, yes I've always used social media
AP: And how do you think it's changed over time?
SS: So when I started in my role the only social media we really used actively was Facebook and now we use 5 or 6 different social media channels so I think there's been a huge amount of new social media channels that people are using. I think the way people use social media also changes all the time ... just their willingness to interact with brands and how they want to interact with brands has changed. A lot of people use social media to complain and for sales and things like that rather than anything else
AP: So you said you use 5 or 6 platforms, which ones do you use?
SS: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, and we have a blog... I think that's everything
AP: And which one do you find the most effective for your business?
SS: So Facebook we've obviously got the most followers cause Facebook has been around for so much longer and we've been actively using it for so much longer. Definitely when we put a promotion or anything on Facebook it gets the most traction. But we've just recently, like this year, started using Pinterest and that's been really effective for our brand because our brand is very visual so yeah that's been really good for us and then also we find Twitter is quite good our following is a lot smaller but it's quite effective as well
AP: Do you look at how it translates into sales, like the conversion and in terms of which platform is better conversion-wise?
SS: Yeah so we look at mostly just using analytics, just look at how many people are coming from different social media platforms and actually then shopping on our site so yeah looking directly at how much revenue we generate from each social media platform on a monthly basis and yeah Facebook is the biggest but then it's... it used to be Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest has just taken over Twitter
AP: And how do you manage negative comments?
SS: Negative comments we always respond to and we never delete them or hide them or anything like that so basically our strategy to any negative comment is to acknowledge it, apologise and direct them to our customer service team so get them off of social media as soon as we can cause people just tend to rant and the longer you've got them ranting on your page the worse it is
AP: Do you have like a set list of dialogue that you use?
SS: We don't have like a set dialogue but we definitely have like a language that we speak in but I suppose cause I've been working there so long it's just quite natural for me but if I was to get a really difficult, negative comment on Facebook I would probably write up a response and then take that to our PR person or our Marketing Manager and say do you think this is ok? and then respond to them
AP: And what about over the weekend, do you have anyone monitoring over the weekend?
SS: Not really but the people above me say my manager and the Marketing Manager would occasionally look on our Facebook page so I think they sort of have it on their radar a little bit and if we've got some sort of special promotion or something going on, like you know we had this campaign that ran over two weeks and it was every day and so then we'd have someone checking it over the weekendbut other than that no
AP: Do they have like alerts set up on their phone to keep an eye out for bad comments?
SS: Oh not necessarily for bad comments but they'd just constantly be logged in on their phone and just check our page
AP: Well thank you very much So and So
THE END
