So what have you been hearing about social media lately? “It’s the frontier! The future! The special sauce that makes all marketing successful!”

Social media is an important and key component of your marketing strategy, it is not fairy dust that makes business leads come rushing in for your company. It’s hard work!

Goals

  • What are you trying to accomplish by monitoring your social media presence?
  • Do you want to find conversations that could help drive traffic to you website?
  • Increase your (or your companies) thought leadership?
  • Generate leads?
  • Sales?

By selecting one or two specific goals you will be able to target your efforts and streamline your process to specifically reach those goals.

New Routine

You want to make sure you have accounts set up on all the networks you want to target. This is something you must do before you can really begin. The accounts you create will be a place for you customers to interact with you and a way for you to deliver great content to you developing networks. A few networks to think about creating are:

  •  Twitter
  • LinkedIn Group
  • Facebook Page
  •  Google+
  • Blog

When setting up your networks make sure you include the following:

  • Photo and /or logo
  • Links back to your website
  • Content about you and your company

Then you will want to make sure all your employees set up personal twitter and linked in accounts so they can represent you company as well.

What should you be monitoring?  Facebook Business Page

Facebook Business Page is where your industry friends, customers, and critics can all interact directly with your company. They can post questions, comments or feedback. Facebook members can interact with each other while discussing your posts. Some ways people can interact on your Facebook Business Page are:

  • Wall Posts: Anyone you are friends with on Facebook can post on your wall. They can say good things, complain, talk about a recent experience they have had with your company.
  • Comments: Comments are an opportunity to react to a wall post. You and your ‘friend’ can comment or have a conversation about a post.
  • Likes: If someone “Likes” a post this means they like the content, which usually means they agree on what you are saying, the old ‘thumbs up!’

Twitter

Twitter, like everything else, has it’s good qualities and it’s bad. It can provide you with lots of beneficial information it can also be overwhelming due to the clutter it can cause. Here is some of the information and tweets you should be looking out for:

  • Questions about your company: You want to be ready to respond to all tweets about products you carry. If you can not give them helpful information about your business maybe you can guide them to one of your customers.
  • Questions about your industry: A great way to develop credibility with a person is to answer questions. Be as helpful as you can when someone has a question and that person is more likely to come back to you when they need a product or service you can provide.
  • Requests for support: To keep customers happy you have to answer there questions. If a customer tweets a request for help you should respond accordingly. If you decide to ignore the call for help think of it as giving someone else your client.
  • Complaints and feedback: It is important to acknowledge and resolve all issues as they come up. It could be a complaint a client had and is still willing to work with you or feedback as to how to improve your services, either way, it is important to resolve it quickly.
  • Praise: That’s right, say thank you! Retweet it. Save it to your favorites. Give praise to that person who appreciated you, it always pays off to give thanks.
  • Competitor mentions: Even if only for information and data, monitoring conversations your competitors are having, weather they are praising or complaining or just asking simple questions. It defiantly can’t hurt to know what the other guy is doing.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great platform for individual employees to develop thought leadership and grow a companies reach as a whole. What should you be monitoring on LinkedIn to do just that?

  • LinkedIn Answers: This section of LinkedIn is a great way to showcase your proficiency. Users use this to request information, resources, tips and advice. LinkedIn enables you to monitor questions that are relevant to your business. By responding with a thoughtful answer you could win “Best Answer.”
  • Group Discussions: Members also interact often within groups, posting discussion questions. They offer opportunities to answer, comment and link to your resources when it makes sense and is valuable to your community.

Google+

Google+ isn’t even a year old yet, it is the new social media network on the block and has already gathered more than 40 million users! On November 7th, Google announced it will allow businesses to create company pages. The reason Google+ stands out most is cause it is not just another network. This is the networks that is connected to the world’s leading search engine. What should you be monitoring?

  • Comments: Are people liking your content or do they have feedback for improvement? You want to make sure you are monitoring the comments you may be getting on posts.
  • Circle Streams: Monitoring the stream of information being shared across your different circles is an interesting way of possibly jumping in on discussions and conversations.

Blogs

It goes without saying, blogs are a major part of your social media and marketing strategy. It is very important to be aware of what others write about your company in order to respond properly. Things you are going to want to keep watch of are:

  • Blog Articles: Consider that blog articles and news coverage are equals! Who is writing about your company and what are they saying?
  • Comments: What are people saying in response to your articles, competitors or industry?
  • Links: You want to make sure that your article contain links to where you got your information if necessary.

Your New 10 Minute Schedule

Now that you know exactly what you are looking for in monitoring your social media presence you can form a new habit of logging in.

  • 3 minutes: Check Twitter, anyone chatting about your company or its competitors?
  • 2 minutes: Scan Google News and Blogs Alerts for important articles.
  • 3 minutes: Filter and flag applicable industry-related LinkedIn questions.
  • 2 minutes: Look over your wall comments for Facebook and Google+.

 

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