Social Media Marketing can become overwhelming if it is not being managed carefully.
Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube are all powerful tools to market your business online and it is tempting to jump into all of them. Before long, you will have hundreds of people responding to you on each of these platforms and it will be another PR disaster if you cannot manage it properly.
The good news is, you don’t have to put yourself through such a scenario.
There are many methods to simplify your social media marketing strategy. Here are some tips that could help you to formulate an initial strategy:
Show yourself on platforms where your Customers are located
Focus on the platforms where your prospective customers are already congregating.
In Singapore’s context, the two biggest social media sites will be Linkedin and Facebook. Beyond that, it will depend on the specific niche market that you wish to target. Listen to your customers and see which platforms they talk about most, then deliberately ignore the rest.
Limiting the number of sites that you manage helps you to focus and give it the attention it deserves. In the long run, it will pay off as a better and deeper engagement with your customers.
Take Advantage of Available Tools
There are a lot of tools available in the market that could help you to manage your social media presence. Most of these allow you the ability to update all your accounts through one software. This saves you time and effort to log in into each participating platform and post them one at a time.
Schedule Your Updates
Plan your content ahead of time and schedule your updates. This way you are able to maximize your time by pre-planning all your content meant for that day and be released to work on other things on hand.
Share the Responsibility Internally
Many successful social media strategies are managed by a team of people, each chipping in new ideas and engaging customers on various topics and activities.
The employees are either managing the social media channels on a rotational basis internally or each employee are focused in contributing a certain type of engagement content to the public. Engagement content can be in the form of news, contests, product launches, partnerships, perks, discounts, etc.
Get Help from the Community
Provide fresh and relevant information to your existing group of social media followers will get difficult after a while. It will be common for you to start spending more and more time finding new content to post to keep the page active.
The easiest fix will be asking your community for help.
Let everyone know that you are looking for new and interesting content and get them to send you new ideas. Besides finding brand new content, you can also follow others and repost content that is relevant to your business. Most people won’t really care if the content that you release is not entirely original. Chances are, they are unlikely to follow the same group of people as you, so they’ll hear it from you first anyway.
Don’t Follow Everyone Who Follows You
You might feel obliged and that it is good manners to follow everyone who follows you, but you should not do so.
For platforms like Facebook, following is a two-way street. Accepting a friend request would enable you to automatically see each other’s update unless you deliberately click on the "Unfollow" button.
However for platforms like Twitter or Instagram, users can follow you without any technical requirements to follow them back.
No one says that you are obligated to, and most people won’t be offended if you don’t. Keep your following list small and relevant so that you can keep yourself up-to-date on their progress effectively.
Stick to a Time Limit
Social media can be addictive. You might find yourself in situations to check on your Facebook account every five minutes for new notifications and it will be very disruptive to the rest of your work.
The best way to manage this is to set a time limit of about 15 mins and logout completely after that. If you are managing multiple accounts, keep your time to about 5 to 10 mins and move on to the next one quickly once the time is up.
Use Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a free service from Google that will help you to gain information that has been published on the web that matches keywords that you specify.
This will be a much more effective way to monitor and look out for new content to post.
You can either opt for information to be emailed to you as soon as it is found or request the information to be consolidated and sent as one email on a daily or weekly basis.
Measure Your Impact and Adjust Accordingly
It is common that we have a specific strategy in mind to engage users through social media and we blindly stick to the plan for months or years with no opportunity to review and adjust. You might find yourself in the situation that you are not getting the results that you were expecting.
It is a good practice to take time to figure out if there is something you are doing wrong.
If not, ask yourself if this engagement direction is really worth your time to continue.
It does not make sense if you are doing these things just because everyone else is also doing so. Evaluate and focus on the social media platforms that are working for you.
Conclusion
Yes, social media marketing is powerful, but it is only another tool that you can adopt to communicate to potential customers. If you are not getting the results you need, perhaps it is time to reassess your overall strategy and focus your time on areas that produce better results.