"Social media Governance should be enterprise-wide and holistic"
 

Ensuring Social Media as an asset for business
Social networking websites allow individuals to interact with one another and build relationships. When companies join the social channels, consumers can interact with them. That interaction is personal to users because of their previous experiences with social networking sites.

Social networking sites and blogs allow individual followers to “retweet” or “repost” comments made by the product being promoted. By repeating the message, all of the users connections are able to see the message, therefore reaching more people. Social networking sites act as word of mouth. As the information about the product is being put out there and is getting repeated, more traffic is brought to the product/company.

Precautions/preliminaries before adopting Social media for the Organization
The main contributing factors should be the customer profile of that organization and their presence in the social media. Another important aspect to be considered is how best the organization can respond to comments/complaints about the organization. If engaging with the audience is not planned properly and responses to the post are not given immediately, the audience will accept the posts by unsatisfied customers at face value and the image of the organization is taken a beating.

Hence, a conscious decision by the organization is to be taken to adopt social media taking into consideration customers profile of the organization and also the ability of the organization to engage with the audience effectively.

Once the decision to participate in the social media is taken by the organization, the first thing to do is put in place Social media governance policy to ensure consistent customer experiences, reliable content creation, data governance and regulatory compliance.

Social media governance should be enterprise-wide and holistic. For top management to play their role effectively, they need to understand the risks and the opportunities social media offers to the organization.

The policy should specify the roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder within the organization like the top management (Board of Directors), Head (Marketing), Head (Customer service), Head (Communications/Public Relations) , Head ( Information Technology) and the Social Media Team which engages the Audience.

Social media participation is definitely an asset to any organization for marketing and brand building because of low cost and personalized interaction and also the credibility factor built-in. But having proper policies and infrastructure to maintain and engage social media and customers is of utmost importance for its success.