Maximize Your Social Media Marketing Efforts
You know that you need social media these days for business marketing. That is the fact in our modern digital world, and it will most probably stay for a very long time. The trick many businesses are trying to get a handle on lately is investing their time and money on social media efforts. And yes, if you’re one of the many unaware, there is more to social media than just Facebook and Twitter.
With these management steps, you should, at the very least, be able to get a jumpstart on managing marketing on social media sites, updating them correctly and handling your market audience effectively. Let us start with the most important tool in your arsenal for dealing with these sites, Social Media Management Tools.
Using Social Media Management tools – The great idea that these tool represents basically is the idea of a “one stop shop” in social media updates. Instead of logging on to a multitude of sites and then manually updating each one, social media management tools and services let you update them simultaneously from one site or software application. You only need to setup all the accounts beforehand and enter the login information to the service. It will handle the publishing of the rest.
So, if you can imagine having an announcement for your company about a contest or some such promotion, it would take about an hour, just to login to lots of social networking sites cutting, pasting and formatting. With these management tools, you just enter the update in one field, press update and you update ALL in just 5 minutes. So it really helps you manage everything fast.
You may be asking right now, what are some examples of these social media management tools? Well there are a lot to choose from, and each has a different set of social media that they can update. There are also free and paid services that have varying degrees of effectiveness. So it will be up to you to choose from these services. However, here is a list of what we recommend:
- Hootsuite: http://hootsuite.com/p_6898
- Sprout Social: http://sproutsocial.com/
- Wildfire: http://www.wildfireapp.com/
- Pixelpipe: http://pixelpipe.com/ (use your twitter account to register)
- Only Wire: https://www.onlywire.com/
Decide on a single image and message – Once you do have your tool, you now have to plan your messages. The worst thing that you can do here is to post eclectic or divergent posts and content in your social media. That is not “optimizing” your marketing at all. You need to decide on a single image or coherent message to display to your readers. This allows you to form an overall impression on them that of course would be beneficial to your small business.
So take the time to sit down and write out and sketch out the image and overall impression that you want your audiences to get from your social media posts. Make sure that it is coherent and it is easily understandable. Your message and image should sink in to people more effectively when you do this.
Dedicate a small team – Now, in terms of implementation, the key to succeeding, besides using a management tool is to have a small team to help you. A small team of two to three people should actually be enough. One of course would be you, managing the content being produced. The other two or more would be responsible for posting and scheduling updates, along with responses to questions that your “followers” might have. Schedule your team in shifts, and if possible have 24 hour surveillance of your social media. In this way you will have active social media profiles that audiences will like, with your business prospering from it.
Basic Management tips– Here are some basic management tips and practices that you should remember doing in managing your social media profiles.
- Have a regular schedule of updates – As was touched on before, you should have a regular schedule of updates. Do not just post content when you need to. You MUST have an active profile, and people should be seeing something new from your feeds daily if need be. If it is not a major announcement, you can give people some interesting link, fact or entertaining tid-bit. This is important to always keep your profile alive, encouraging people to read from your content more.
- Have a “response” person – You should dedicate one or two persons in your team to respond to inquiries, comments and requests. Train them just like a customer service representative. This is important as interactivity is of course the key feature in the social media environment. So have a few persons who are expert responders, giving people a friendly impression when they talk to your profiles.
- Develop regular viral content – In the span of your updates, your goal should be to develop regular viral content. I know it will take real creativity to do this, but you should try whenever possible. It is well worth the effort, as just one video, image or post going viral will do heaps to your online marketing efforts.
- Review the Response Data and Analytics – Finally, you should always review response data and if possible check on the web analytics of your profiles. Always gather how many followers you have, how many friends, how many responses and how may hits your social media profiles have.
Knowing the statistics allow you to spot problems early on so that you can correct your social media content accordingly. It should also give you an insight on the type of people viewing your profile, just in case your market demographics are changing. The more information you get, the more you can improve your efforts.
With all the concepts and tools above, you should easily be able to optimize and maximize your efforts in social media marketing. You will be managing how you can “socialize” while marketing at the same time, to the overall benefit of your business.
This is a great read, I’ve used two different tools with my social media, Sprout Social and HootSuite. Not only by using the right software for implementation you would be able to succeed in social media, but with a great management steps as listed above can make your marketing effort even more worth it. Great tips, thanks!
I recently started using Hootsuite to manage social media and I can honestly say that it is one tool I would be lost without.
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