Social media isn’t something that can be used to create immediate results. It takes a consistent effort to successfully manage it and achieve your goals, whether you are looking for new fans, press recognition or more hits on your website. Social media can take a lot of time and resources to do it right and unfortunately not everyone has the opportunity to spend hours on Twitter or Facebook. Business owners want to ensure they are gaining a return on investment and can see tangible results from their social media usage. Here are five ways to effectively manage your social media and make sure your time is being spent wisely.
Helpful services like HootSuite and Tweetdeck were created with the busy social media user in mind. These allow you to use multiple accounts and save time on having to sign in and out or remember various passwords. You can use a range of social media services including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and more.
Don’t expect to have thousands of users talking about your company within a year unless you are a huge corporation or a celebrity. Set realistic and achievable goals. What are you trying to achieve? Do you want to build better communication with your followers, reach a bigger audience or identify people in need of your product? You shouldn’t just be on social media solely because everyone else is. Look at what other companies are doing for inspiration if you need to, and then decide what you can do better.
It is important to ensure you are achieving your goals and constantly working toward new ones. Otherwise you are wasting time that could be better spent elsewhere. Keeping track of your progress is a good way of knowing when a strategy is working or not. Hootsuite offers free analytics tools if want simple statistics on how your audience is responding by checking how many people are reached, who you are engaging and how your content is distributed. If you are looking for something more in-depth, Spredfast provides all of this information and more. Their benchmarking feature allows you to compare other successful social media campaigns to your own and large corporations may purchase plans costing thousands of dollars.
For those too busy to spend hours with social media, setting an automatic schedule means you can prepare all of your updates early and have them posted whenever you want. Hootsuite and Tweetdeck offer this service and we think using tools like these is essential for the effective social marketer.
Make sure your updates are always relevant to your target audience. Use Google Alerts as a quick and easy way to monitor the internet for relevant keywords or search phrases which are popular. Google will notify your inbox when these instances appear and then you can post as soon as something comes up.
Our experienced team of social media professionals at Guaranteed SEO can save you time and help your business achieve its goal. Whether you are looking for website design, SEO, blogging or internet marketing, we can help take your company to the next level. Contact us for more information.
