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.
About Sean Rasmussen
This Tips for social media management is timely – after all the exposure we have had on web 2.0 during this comp.
I have just been running through some of mine – and what a mess!
Prioritising what I can focus on effectively is my next step. I think so far DIGG amd FriendFeed have been good. I had ignored DIGG for a long time before this, but no more.
I need to update my SocialOomph more frequently too as it is a handy auto apps.
I need to keep working to make sure I have an effective Social Media Management plan in place. I will be looking more into Friend Feed following this post. I enjoy Facebook, Digg and Twitter so will keep on focussing on them. SocialOomph is new to me but it is really helping
This is something I really need to put into action, my social media management is very random at the moment, lots to develop in this area, lots of great tips in this article, thanks.
What a great article. With all these social media online now social media management really becomes an important issue. Otherwise you loose sight of what you are doing and what is actually working.
I like your tip to Make a list of the top sites that are bringing you results. My only problem is that I will soon need a list to keep on top of all my (check) lists ….
Thanks for these Tips for Effective Social Media Management.
Participating in Social Media can very be very overwhelming and time-consuming, especially for the beginner. It takes time to effectively participate and communicate via your various SM channels (eg Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn).
It therefore makes good sense to use a program like Hootsuite as not only can you can post status updates and links to your various profiles, but you can also monitor all the conversations, from one platform.
I also like the fact that you can use their URL shortner and then track the statistics/click through rate per message.
Hi Sean,
I really need to do better social media management. When you have multiple profiles across the social media sites, it’s important to find ways to save yourself some time. Otherwise you’ll never keep up.
I try to spend more time on the social media sites that give me the most traffic. But, I still have so much trouble getting everything done.
Hi Sean,
I really enjoyed reading this post and blog again, as it has hit home how effective Social Media Management is, in developing good sites and have traffic going to them.
Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Digg, also Socialoomph are great sites for adding your sites on and getting backlinks as well.
Social Media is becoming such a dominating factor in my life and it was great to read the above post to get my head around the importance of managing your online social life and to ensure that I am giving quality to my friends.
Hi Sean,
With all the social media sites available I see it to be quite a timely concept to monitor each & every one of them, I think this may be a place for me to ad a bit more attention : )
Hey… Thanks for the info. The key point I got out of your post was the fact that you need to engage with the audience. That’s crucial to a successful social management strategy. Hopefully we’ll all pickup more on that.
I think another important point about social media management is that you should get really good at one platform before you start adding others. If you sign-up for a bunch of accounts without getting a good sense of how to build an audience there or how you will use it, you could be chasing your tail for awhile just trying to learn it all (it will feel very overwhelming).
Personally I’m not a fan of autofeeds because I want to tailor each of my messages depending on the platform I’m using, but I know others find this to be a very successful strategy.