Social media can be a tricky domain to master, particularly for more risk averse brands.

If you run or work for a risk averse brand, you know that social media is a difficult beast for a number of reasons. The concept of ‘real-time’ takes on a whole new challenge when you are constantly concerned with your brand’s perception in the public eye. The catch is that social is very quickly becoming less of an option and much more of a requirement – for all brands. So what can those brands that are afraid of the platform do to conquer it?

These are a few best practices that a more risk averse brand should adopt when it comes to transitioning into a social business.

Plan, Plan, Plan

The best way to ensure that your brand is protected in any case and to minimize the risk that it is not, requires you to plan for virtually every single possible scenario that might arise. Lots of issues can come up (in a very public way) on social media.

Early on in the planning stages of a program or campaign, there should be an evaluation of every piece of content (or style of content) you plan on sharing in order to see if there is any way it might be misinterpreted or backfire. Create scenarios and figure out how those scenarios would be addressed. Remember, deleting a post or a tweet because it resonated poorly is not an option. The moment it is shared, it is seen and captured forever. Plan for exactly that reality.

Strategize

It sounds an awful lot like a plan, but your planning is a minor part of the overall strategy. If you plan on transitioning into a social business, your strategy will be the cornerstone of operational success. You are essentially trying to shift your company’s culture, and that is not a simple task; particularly when there is no guideline telling you what to do.

Your strategy should encompass everything from a content calendar to the aforementioned planning for various scenarios on social networks (good or bad). The strategy will prove to be a useful guideline (and risk minimizing) resource as you make this transition.

Start Counting

Since social has become a part of business, the question everyone seems to as is whether or not “social media” can be measured. Social media is a communications tool; you don’t need to measure it. What you need to do is measure your progress and see how your use of social media is making an impact.

Providing clearly laid out key performance indicators (KPIs) and benchmarks (either internal or competitive) is a great way to showcase the values to a risk averse brand or board. Explaining exactly what is being measured, how you plan on measuring it and what metrics will be used as indicators for success or failure will make even the least social savvy individuals more comfortable with using the platform.

Teach

Assuming that people know how to properly use social media for business is somewhat ignorant. Yes, there are roughly two billion people with active social profiles. But that still leaves about five billion without any. And while there might be over a billion users on Facebook, there are only about 30 million businesses and a fraction of advertisers on the network. Teach your teams how to use these networks.

Provide training, introduce concepts slowly and send out refreshers so that people can truly familiarize themselves with using these networks from a business standpoint. Again, when trying to change a culture, it is best to start incrementally and work your way out.

Play It Safe

If you are worried that providing customer service on Twitter will open your brand up to negative backlask, there is a simple way to ensure that this does happen: don’t provide customer service on Twitter.

Just because there are a thousand different places where your brand can be “social” doesn’t mean that it has to be. If you are uncomfortable with a particular feature on a social network, or perhaps you don’t trust the security measurements that have been taken in order to protect private conversations, you simply do not have to use them. Do not feel as though you need to have a presence on every network. It is better to have an excellent presence on two or three networks, than a mediocre presence on a dozen.

Conclusion

These are just a few ways in which more risk averse brands can begin adopting and integrating social media. It can be an intimidating playing field at first, but the incremental involvement and the education process can help even the most reserved brands make an impact.

Would you consider your brand to be risk averse? What have you done in order to conquer social in that case? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!