There is an almost endless number of social media sites out there in cyberspace. Some of them require a lot of management and some practically run on autopilot.
If you’re not effectively managing your social media accounts, you won’t get the most that social marketing has to offer. These sites help you network, get more backlinks, and build your online reputation.
Here are some social media management tips that will help you to get the most out of this form of marketing:
Tips For Effective Social Media Account Management
• Sign up for services that post to multiple sites. Several social bookmarking services will automatically feed your updates to other sites. Friendfeed is a good one. It takes time to set it up initially but is well worth the effort. Check in occasionally to see if new services are added.
• Make a list of the top sites that are bringing you results. (Hint: Check your website stats to see where your traffic is coming from) and be sure to post on those sites most often.
• Use social media sites for competitive analysis. Pay attention to where your biggest competitors are posting. Doing this can help you be seen where the ‘action’ is. Consider following your competitor’s followers, for example.
• Login to top sites individually on occasion and spend time interacting. Don’t be all “one-sided” in terms of posting links. Be sure you interact with your followers, follow them back, etc. Sites where this is particularly important include: Twitter and Facebook, for instance. Spend time giving others’ posts a thumbs up or a re-tweet. Respond to direct messages, etc.
• Mine for data. Spend time on some of the top bookmarking sites searching through hashtags or categories to help you find people to follow, topics to read, conversations to weigh in on.
• Sign up for a service that allows post-dating. SocialOomph offers a free and paid option that will help you manage multiple accounts from one place as well as set up auto-responses and scheduled updates.
• Check your ratio of promotional versus valuable updates. Some sites are really just one-sided but for others, it’s about networking more than self-promotion.
• Be sure to take advantage of profiles. Many social marketing sites offer a spot with the ability to say a bit about yourself as well as point to your website. Use this feature so that people following you can learn more about you, visit your site, and so that people will want to follow you to begin with.
• Use photos wherever possible. Your profile photo, rather than a generic thumbnail (on Twitter, for example) will be more effective. People like to connect with people.
• Use tags, descriptions, and other elements to maximise the use of the social sites. If using an auto-posting tool, be sure that you take advantage of all available fields, such as tags, conversation starters, photos, etc. When posting on a new site, preview your post or bookmark to be sure that you’re using all available elements. This will strengthen your ability to get noticed and for those posts to help you gain search engine favour.
Sites you use today may or may not be the best social marketing sites out there. As you explore different sites, you’ll find ones that appeal to you as well as work in your favour to get you traffic and search engine rankings.
Experiment and spend a bit of time with these sites on a regular basis and use some of the above social media management tips so you can continue to get the most out of these tools.
