5 Social Media Management Necessities for a Busy Professional
Social media is no longer just a haven for gossiping students sharing photos or for keeping in touch with old friends from school that you would have lost track of years ago were it not for Facebook. Chances are that you know this but this does not necessarily mean that your social media is as effective as it could be. Effective Social Media Management is vital for the busy professional.
Effective Social media management is important in any business – no matter the size of your business. Large corporations have social media management teams for their online presence. Chances are you don’t have this opportunity. This doesn’t mean that social media management is any less important.
Having said that, even if it is just you, there are tools you can use to manage your social media presence and improve your productivity. If you are going to engage with social media, you want to do so with a tool that makes your life easier. If you are looking for the right social media tool you want one that offers the following:
1) Scheduling – Social Media Management in Advance
Your target audience may not be online when you are awake – and what about when you want to go on holidays.
Social Media Management tools with scheduling functionality mean that even if you’re in New York, you can schedule messages out to your customers in Tokyo during their workday. I participate in a number of Twitter conversations. One of them happens twice a day (to cater for different audiences in different parts of the world. I participate more actively in the conversation that happens whilst I am awake and schedule tweets that will be of interest to those participating whilst I am asleep to give those tweeters more of a chance to see my content. Some successful business tweeters will also schedule similar tweets to go out at different times of day. Like Facebook, not all followers will see all of your tweets. Just don’t over-spam them.
2) Geographical targeting
When it comes to interacting with your customers, those in different locations may have different needs, speak different languages or follow different trends. This makes your social media management needs more complex. You’re going to want a social media management tool that optimizes your searches and filters your searches by language to help you curate relevant content for different demographics. Social media platgforms provide useful search functionality and can be great for spotting trends that you can capitalise upon in order to boost your business and optimise your social media activities. You need the right social media managment tools to be able to do this most effectively.
3) Keywords
Social media is an effective way for businesses to keep their finger on the pulse. It can be a great way to find new prospects and manage potential leads. Setting up keywords or search streams provide insight into what is trendy among your customers. This can help you develop a marketing strategy that focuses on customer’s lifestyles and personal preferences. For example, a business I am involved with is in telecommunications. I have searches for keywords related to our competitors. If I see someone expressing some sort of frustration I can reach out to them. If I can help solve a problem I may have gained a customer for life and, as I have helped them through Facebook or Twitter, I can only hope that they will tell their followers about me and how awesome I am.
Keywords are useful for keeping track of competitors’ activities but they’re also useful for tracking brands that are complementary to your offering. If your product is often purchased in conjunction with another product, keep an eye on the complementary product’s social media activity to take advantage of promotions or recent sales, as these are potential leads ready to be converted. Finding complementary businesses can also help you build relationships, foster collaboration between businesses and identify growth opportunities.
The right social media management tools make this possible.
4) Collaboration
As your business grows, or if you take on business partners, you may find yourself in a situation where you need to share data from your social media accounts and activities. Collaboration and the sharing of data is integral for an ongoing and effective social media campaign. You need to identify tools that give you the opportunity to share with a team and execute an integrated social media management strategy.
5) Reporting
Gone are the days of social media purely being about ‘building buzz.’ If someone tries to tell you that this is all there is (especially if they are trying to sell you services) then you should run for the hills as they don’t know what they are talking about. For big companies, social media is now a line item in their yearly budgets. Big companies invest significant resources in order to grow their business and build their brands and, because of the significant amounts invested, they are required to show a return on investment.
Make sure your tool has the ability to analyze important metrics such as click-through rates on shortened links, clicks by region and top referrers. It’s also important to have access to Facebook Insights and Google Analytics. This will allow you to determine which messages resulted in the highest number of conversions, which platform is providing the greatest return and which time of day is most effective to drive traffic.
The right social media managment tools give you access to measurements and statistics you need.
What it takes to go Pro?
Social is here to stay and to maintain a competitive advantage, businesses need to stay abreast of this ever-evolving space. HootSuite Pro help me engage with audiences and analyze my campaigns across multiple social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn from one secure web-based dashboard. It allows me to manage multiple accounts and keep track of multiple campaigns all from the one convenient dashboard