Should UX own social media?

Amid the continuing debate over whether PR or Marketing should own social media, I have another suggestion. Let the User Experience team own social media. Why? Because PR and Marketing are all about the company. User Experience is all about the customer. And successful social media is also all about the customer.

User Experience professionals, such as information architects, have training in user-centered design. They are the people who do research to identify the users of your website or product, identify traits or characteristics of these people, create personas to describe them, determine the users’ goals, and design a product or website that meets those goal.

User Experience professionals don’t just build for the customer, though. The point of UX is to find what I call the Sweet Spot, the place where a business or organization’s goals and the users’ goals align. UX folks build products or websites that work well for the user while meeting the company’s goals. They have to understand the business strategy and roadmap, stakeholder requirements (like measurement and ROI), partner needs, and the customer needs. UX is charged with putting all of that together to create a system that meets all the core requirements elegantly.

Who better than UX to help build a social media strategy?

True. User experience professionals may not understand marketing (though the best of them will have a good grasp). However, UX requires people who are adept at learning and grasping concepts quickly, so they can be taught.

Besides, social media marketing is less about marketing and more about creating an online, ongoing social experience. Building your social media strategy should start with identifying your goals–just like building a website. It should start with understanding the business–also where UX starts. Then, it should focus on identifying and understanding your social audience. Who are they? Where do they live online and what do they do? What do they want and value from their participation in those online communities? How can you provide what they want in a way that helps meet your business goals?

At Coherent, that’s exactly how we approach planning your social media strategy. We take a user experience approach and use many of the same techniques. In the future, as the idea of “customer experience” is refined and best practices develop, I think we’ll see user experience professionals hired as part of the marketing team. They will bring their expertise and well-honed toolkit to social media marketing. They’ll help research customers and their online environments, help develop user-focused social marketing strategies, ensure the user’s experience is holistic and consistent across customer touchpoints, and test the effectiveness of the strategy.

If UX led social media, you wouldn’t hear nearly as many complaints about companies using traditional, broadcast strategies in the new world of social media. By placing the priority and focus on the customers and their experience, you would see social media strategies built around satisfying the customer rather than broadcasting a message or conveying a story.

As we move to better integrate social into our websites, UX will become even more important. User experience is already focused on improving the website. Websites are going to become more personalized and more social. UX will necessarily be involved in that process–but by owning social media, UX can better identify ways to integrate it into your website and design that integration.

Involve User Experience in your Social Media Planning

Even if you’re not willing to hand over your social media marketing to your user experience team,  you’d do well to add them to the mix. If your company is large enough to have a UX department with trained professionals, or you have the resources to engage UX consultants, I suggest you give them a try. Here are five steps you can take to improve your social media efforts by including UX:

• Bring your UX folks into the fold. Include them in meetings on social meda work and strategy. Let them learn about your marketing/PR efforts and weigh in.
• Have your UX people do user research and build personas. Give them your business goals and ask them to determine who the social audience is, given those goals. (Remember, your social audience may not be your customer.)  Your UX person may even observe and film some of these users. Ask them to create personas for each social audience.
• Let your UX people teach you about your audience and how they interact with your assets. UX takes a very different perspective than marketing.  Let UX research how your audience interacts with you via social media and your website, and then take all of the information gained about your audience and do a brownbag on it. You will almost certainly learn something new from the UX perspective of your audience.
• Have UX lead a brainstorming session on strategy. Ask your UX person to lead a session to brainstorm social media strategies. The UX person will ask a different set of questions, focused much more on the customer’s goals, and will almost certainly generate new ideas for you to consider.

The most successful companies in this brave new social world are going to incorporate their user experience personnel as part of their social media teams. What about you?