Social Media Marketing: How To Manage Accounts Efficiently And Stay Sane

admin    Social Media Marketing     Accounts, Efficiently, Manage, marketing, Media, Sane, Social, Stay

Social Media Marketing: How To Manage Accounts Efficiently And Stay Sane

Many organizations and businesses are joining the social media marketing wave, but some are holding back. There is a lot to consider, not the least of which is time management. Is it really worth the time and effort to build such a presence for your group? The answer is probably yes- you just need to go about it the right way.

There are many forms of social media that you can choose to participate in. The first step to get started is analyzing what your group needs, how social media can help you meet these needs, and what end-goals you want to accomplish. There are lots of resources, on-line and in print, that can help you determine the answers to these questions and help you lay out the basis for your social media marketing plan. I’d recommend checking out David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing and PR as a start. There are also courses and seminars that train individuals in effective social media marketing, such as the New Media Drivers License course at Michigan State University.

Once you’ve determined the ways you want to use social media, you need to determine what social media tools you should use. There are a lot of options, and they won’t all be right for you. Do some digging and find out which tools will meet your needs. You must keep your target audience in mind as well. If you build a large presence on Facebook but your professional clients are all on LinkedIn you are missing out.
Once you have your plan, and you’ve chosen your tools and set up your account(s), how do you keep the process work from overtaking your life? The trick is to keep a balance. Start slow- don’t take on more than you can handle at the start. Do some “listening” and monitoring, getting into the routine of checking account activity, before committing yourself to particular numbers of periodic posts. To avoid having to visit individual sites for listening consider using a web aggregator, such as Google Reader. This will bring all the traffic involving keywords and phrases you designate to one place, allowing you to read it in a more time-efficient manner. Then use an account management tool, such as Hootsuite, to run your accounts. A tool like this will allow you to post to multiple accounts from one site, as well as set up some monitors on social media traffic.

By setting up these tools you’ll free up time and avoid unnecessary redundant behavior (such as logging in to multiple accounts.) This will allow you (or your employees) to work on other important tasks, instead of wasting time waiting for pages to load. Social media marketing is a great tool for your organization, but you should take care to manage accounts in a time-efficient way so as to optimize your efforts.

For more information on the resources mentioned above, please visit these websites:

David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing and PR: http://www.davidmeermanscott.com

New Media Drivers License course at Michigan State University: http://newmediadl.com

Hootsuite: http://www.hootsuite.com

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Personal Accounts – the Labour Party’s Answer to a “demographic Time – Bomb”

admin    Web Marketing     Accounts, Answer, Bomb”, Labour, Party’s, personal, Time, “demographic

Personal Accounts – the Labour Party’s Answer to a “demographic Time – Bomb”

It is recognised throughout the western world that as a result of a reducing birth rate and increased longevity in the medium and long term the State cannot afford to continue to fund state pension benefits for the elderly. This scenario has challenged many governments in the past. It is now considered by the current Administration that the only way to deal with this problem is to encourage individuals to take personal responsibility for making some provision for their future retirement income funding needs.

Following the disappointing take up of Stakeholder Pensions, Personal Accounts are the government’s solution to this problem. They will take the form of a national pension scheme which is due to be launched in April 2012. It will act as a top up facility to supplement state pension benefits and any pension benefits an employee has accrued during their working life. Importantly, Personal Accounts will not apply to the self employed.

The Pensions Bill currently progressing through Parliament will result in new legislation to introduce Personal Accounts. It has passed through the House of Commons and is due to be debated in the House of Lords shortly.

The Government wants Personal Accounts to be self sufficient with policy charges levied to fund the costs of running the accounts. Account charges will be very low and it is anticipated that individuals will not require advice, instead seek information from the internet and advise themselves.

Personal Accounts are targeted at employees who are not members of a company scheme and will attempt to force many workers and their employers to make pension contributions for the first time.

With effect from 2012, when it is anticipated that Personal Accounts will be launched, employers will have to automatically enrol all staff into a Personal Account unless it can be proved that a company’s existing pension scheme is at least as good as a Personal Account. Employees who do not want a Personal Account will be able to opt out. It is understood that employees who do so will have to be invited to opt in again on an annual basis.

It is anticipated that contributions to Personal Accounts will be based on the following earnings* percentages:

Employee           4% of earnings
Government        1% employee income tax relief
Employer            3% of employees’ earnings

*The percentages above will be applied to any earnings of more than £5,000 and less than £35,000

Whilst it is anticipated that these contribution levels will be phased in over a number of years they will still result in employees seeing a reduction in their net take home pay and an increase in the size of their employers’ payroll.

As far as advice relating the Personal Accounts is concerned, it is not clear who will pay for this.

There is real concern that one effect of the introduction of Personal accounts will be to reduce means-tested benefits. Discussion is taking place regarding this sensitive area. This may be a very good reason for the low paid to opt out as it may not be in their best interests to have a Personal Account.

Further detail relating to Personal Accounts will be published in the autumn when the Pensions Bill receives Royal Assent. Legislative detail will be clarified shortly after that.

As far as action is concerned it is clearly difficult to make any decisions regarding Personal Accounts until greater detail of their operation is known. It is however important that employers are aware of the introduction of Personal Accounts so they may start to prepare for their introduction.

Twitter Accounts Cross the 105 Million Mark

admin    Web Marketing     Accounts, Cross, Mark, Million, Twitter

The quest to decipher just how many actual users there are of Twitter continues. Yesterday at the Chirp conference being held for Twitter developers, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the group that the number of registered users (let’s call them accounts) is 105 million. That is considerably more the 65 million that comScore has estimated the number at. Macworld reports

Twitter has 105 million registered users, with 300,000 new users signing up every day, Stone said, opening Twitter’s Chirp conference at the Palace of Fine Arts before an audience of just shy of 1,000 developers. That user figure is more than a recent estimate from comScore, which pegged Twitter’s user base at 65 million.

The Twitter API (application programming interface) fields 3 billion requests per day, Williams said. “That’s bigger than all but a couple of Web sites in the world,” he said, claiming it makes Twitter “about the same size as Yahoo.” He said the service has grown 1,500 percent each year on average since “Twitter Inc.” was founded three years ago this month. The service is also fielding about 19 billion searches a month, Williams said, which compares to about 90 billion for Google.

Those are big numbers for sure. The question is just how many of those registered users represent actual active Twitter users. I know of many accounts that sit dormant to protect a brand or have been abandoned by people who caught Twitter fever then determined that there was no value in the service for them. I like to caution in these instances that the hyper usage levels that are seen my social media “experts” and “gurus” and (gulp…) “ninjas” are not reflective of how much the service is used by folks that are not in the industry.

Then there is the question with regard to using Twitter as to how much traffic is seen directly on the Twitter site vs. third party apps like TweetDeck etc. Conventional wisdom has been that the traffic is a 50/50 split but Stone stated that it more like 75/25 with the larger number representing those who do not use the Twitter site to use Twitter. You would expect him to make the numbers appear that way to show how much potential growth there is for the actual site traffic thus giving advertisers the impression that the future is much brighter for sure.

Other tidbits revealed at the conference include the production of an Android app, the 100,000 downloads of Twitter’s official Blackberry app (which is pretty good, I must admit) and the purchase of a one man company which created what will be the basis of the official iPhone app that is on the short term horizon as well.

Since this was being said at a developer conference the Twitter execs who were speaking tried to put nervous Twitter developers at ease. A Reuters report says

Twitter sought to reassure independent software developers at the conference that the company’s moves to add its own home-grown features and versions of the service would not shut out the more than 100,000 third-party programs that have been built to work alongside and enhance Twitter.

“Twitter is truly a collaboration and that is not changing,” said Williams.

But Stone said Twitter would continue to fill in holes it sees in the main product by developing new features and acquiring companies.

“I anticipate a few more” acquisitions this year, Stone said. “I don’t know if we’re going too crazy. But there’s certain things that we need to get done and we want to get done fast, and there’s certain things we can take our time building.”

Maybe those in attendance started setting their eyes on being like that one-man show that was purchased by Twitter. Of course, with over 100,000 developers out there trying to cash-in maybe a lottery ticket would be just as effective to generate income.

View full post on Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim

Why Doesn’t Yahoo! Answers Become More Like Twitter, Where They Have “celebrity” Accounts?

admin    Twitter Marketing     Accounts, answers, Become, celebrity, Doesn't, Like, More, They, Twitter, Yahoo

It would be a great marketing plan for Yahoo! Answers.
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