Harnessing the Power of Social Media

Social media provides the opportunity to build more meaningful relationships with our audiences and establish a strong, distinctive, and recognizable brand across all our channels.

Optimizing the digital experience and channel landscape is critical to our communications mission, so we have several resources to support your social strategies.

Content Management

Bayer uses Sprinklr to manage, approve and publish content, as well as exchange content with other regions and colleagues. Sprinklr is a good choice when you need a tool to simplify your content approval processes. Please reach out to social.media@bayer.com if you need access to Sprinklr. 

Ensuring accessibility on social media:

In line with our mission to engage for trust, Bayer must lead the way in diversity and inclusion across our digital landscape. In addition to guiding what we say and how we visually represent our messages, we will also work to offer accessible and inclusive experiences on all our social channels.

• Use alt-text describing the posted images

• Ensure video content has open or closed captioning

• Write hashtags in camel case and place them either within the sentence or at the end of the post. For example: #WriteHashtagsLikeThis instead of #WRITINGHASHTAGSLIKETHIS or #writinghashtagslikethis

• Provide trigger warnings to avoid exposing people to potentially emotionally harmful content

• Avoid fast-flashing content and GIFs

• Don’t overuse caps. Full-caps can be difficult to read and misinterpreted by screen readers

• Use a color contrast of at least 4.5:1 

• Don’t rely on color to convey meaning

  • Avoid green and red or blue and yellow combinations, as they’re difficult to read.
  • Text can be difficult to read on images, so consider using a solid background or opaque overlay.
  • Ensure there is reasonable spacing between text lines
  • On graphs and charts, consider also using patterns to differentiate data.

Reporting & Evaluation

In addition to keeping your channel up to date and engaging with your community, it is essential to regularly analyze and evaluate your activities. You can use Sprinklr for analytics across all social channels, and we also have a Global Impact Dashboard which is a free, Bayer-owned tool that consolidates social data, paid social media and web analytics, incl. SEO metrics into one place. This tool can also help you identify correlations and trends and make more data based decisions to achieve your social media goals and inform subsequent strategies.

To learn more about data, reporting and understanding KPIs, check out THIS (add link when published on BayerNet) special episode of Behind the Handle, a Bayer podcast focused on all things social media.

Social Listening

Strategic social media listening provides a great overview over current topics, opinions and key players in relation to Bayer. 

Bayer’s preferred listening tools are Talkwalker and Brandwatch. To discuss joining the global setup, please contact Julia Hoppenau about Talkwalker. For Brandwatch questions, please contact Elizabeth Henggeler or Jacob Bohle.

Choosing the Right Partner

When planning, opening or managing a social media channel, we often rely on external service providers. 

When choosing external partners, you should make sure that they adhere to our social media principles. Integrate a corresponding clause into your contracts to bind your partners and discuss the formulation with the respective legal and procurement department.

Make sure that at least one or two other Bayer employees in your department/division have access to the company accounts. Change your password and update the access list of your accounts regularly (e.g., when changing agencies).