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

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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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