As the social brand team for IBM, our objective is to prioritize listening and meaningful interactions with followers across all social media platforms, both external and internal. By publishing less frequently (quality over quantity), we are able to deliver a better user experience. We also help other IBM social media accounts by providing useful feedback and supporting them through our social brand channels and internal community.
To reach these objectives, our strategy is to build a team that provides 24/7 engagement and ensure that the team has the tools and skills necessary to provide value. We have created and published standards and guidelines that apply to all IBM social brand administrators and are accessible to them. We ensure that resources are adequate per social account and that interactions with audiences occur in a timely manner. We also ensure that the voice of the brand is appropriate as managed through individual IBM social brand administrators and that they are deeply connected across external relations, sales, help desk, crisis communications, legal, HR, recruiting,etc. Our team is also global to make sure that someone is always paying attention to the accounts, at all times of day. Social at IBM is not outsourced, but instead IBM employees themselves run social accounts. To execute our objectives successfully, we require two time administrators per platform account. These administrators have extended support across functions and manage all aspects of the accounts including publishing, paid, engagement, listening and, measurement
As a result of a simple, but meaningful engagement strategy, we enjoy the highest engagement rate per post across all platforms among our B2B technology landscape. Using the tool Rival IQ, which pulls from public APIs, we are able to compare ourselves against our competitors. Over the past year, our team has been mentioned in dozens of industry articles touting our engagement strategy:
"IBM's Facebook page currently garners the highest engagement rates among B2B tech brands, as the brand uses the platform to share major news, as well as posts that reflect its culture, brand and people."
"IBM knows its way around the best practices to use in social media and they are not afraid to push the edges of creativity either. They are constantly coming up with new advanced methods to pave a path for other businesses to follow.
