The 5 social-first corporate communications skills you need to level up your career

If you think of all your corporate communications skills as ingredients for a recipe, then social media expertise is the seasoning. It elevates the meal, taking it to new and improved heights. 

After a few tumultuous years, the corporate communications field has evolved dramatically. Today, it’s a critical focus for executive leadership teams as they reconsider how they want to tell their growth story to employees, media, investors and more. 

These diverse needs are driving entirely new insights-driven roles, many of which rely on social to amplify brand messages and understand target audiences. Honing your social media skills can help you evolve alongside the profession, so you can create an even bigger business impact and remain competitive for future job opportunities. 

That doesn’t mean you need to take a “social media for beginners” course. The social applications for corporate communications are unique, so you’re better off tailoring your development plan to your business or team need. To help you create a more personalized learning path, we created this list of essential corporate communications skills that can be revolutionized by social. 

1. Social listening

Every day, millions of people log into their social media accounts to discuss everything and anything, from politics to culture and beyond. These conversations are more than online chit-chat. They’re rich sources of business intelligence. 

With social listening, you can distill those unfiltered conversations into actionable insights that can inform your communications goals. In Sprout, Listening Topics can be designed using pre-built templates or through custom queries. Once your Topic is set up, it will continue to collect social data as long as it’s active. 

While there are a ton of creative ways to use social listening, there are two use cases that can help you refine your strategy: audience insights and brand sentiment. 

Social listening for audience insights

For a message to resonate with its intended audience, it has to be well-researched and tailored. When you’re speaking to several audiences (customers, media outlets, shareholders, etc.), that refinement process can be labor intensive. 

Whether you’re trying to create a more targeted media pitch or you need to understand how audiences are reacting to a brand crisis, social listening is your secret weapon for insights on the fly. 

The team at Indiana University, for example, relied on Sprout’s Social Listening tool to provide the university’s leadership with actionable advice during a campus crisis. When a Twitter user surfaced insensitive Tweets from a tenured IU professor, their social team quickly set up a Listening Topic to understand the volume and reach of the conversations surrounding the issue. 

This empowered the IU leadership team to develop an audience-informed response to the crisis within 24 hours of when the issue first emerged. This fast-paced response strategy mitigated any further escalation, halting what could have been a larger issue in its tracks. 

Social listening for brand sentiment

Brands are, in a sense, celebrities. They garner attention, attract fans and (for better or worse) often have their actions dissected in the public sphere. 

Depending on your brand’s public perception, this type of attention can either be a goldmine or a minefield. That’s why being able to understand and unpack brand sentiment in real time is an essential corporate communications skill. 

Say you’re launching a new corporate social responsibility campaign. If you’re using a social listening tool, like Sprout, you can create a Brand Health Listening Topic to better understand how sentiment has trended around your brand over time. These insights can inform opportunities or risks in your campaign before you launch it broadly. 

Once the campaign is launched, you can monitor conversations around the campaign and your brand to see what’s resonating with your audience and what’s falling short. Referring to this information as you continue to improve your strategy can lead to better results in a shorter amount of time. 

2. Executive communications 

Your executive communications strategy can work wonders when it comes to reinforcing your brand story. But if it only accounts for speaking engagements and internal communications, you’re leaving a lot of opportunity on the table. 

To promote your company’s vision at scale, you need to get your executive leadership team on social. Coaching leaders as they develop their social presence can help your business in quite a few ways. First off, it can increase transparency between your company and valued stakeholders. In fact, 63% of people say CEOs who have their own social profiles are better representatives for their companies than those who do not. 

Ensuring that your leadership team understands the risk involved in posting unchecked content can also reduce the chance of an unfortunate social media faux pas. Remember: if a leader goes rogue on social, that creates more work for your team to clean up. 

How these accounts are managed can vary based on how comfortable your leadership team is with posting on social. If you’re working with a social-savvy CEO, they may be able to manage their profiles themselves with some strategic guidance. If they’re calling Twitter “tweeter,” you’ll need to be heavily involved in the process.  

Such a pleasure talking with @kevonstage about how YouTube can better support creators from all communities. Kevin, congrats again for being part of the #YouTubeBlack Voices Fund Class of 2021! https://t.co/gq6RhrD9BY

— Susan Wojcicki (@SusanWojcicki) December 17, 2021