5 Must-Haves for Social Media Management

Posted on 12th December, by Peter Marino in SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Design

http://reelwebdesign.com/blog/2012/12/12/5-must-haves-for-social-media-management/#sthash.Zt5EmQnj.HYBVpuyH.dpbs

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Social media has grown from a curiosity to an integral piece of corporate strategy in the space of only a few years. Nearly overnight, companies have brought on whole teams of specialists to craft effective social media strategies and manage multiplying numbers of social media accounts. Companies are hungry for better social media tools to engage their constituents. Below is a list of five features key to delivering on a social media strategy.

1) Scheduling
Social media doesn’t sleep, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to! Ensure your social media management tool of choice allows you to schedule messages in advance. So even if you’re in New York, you can schedule messages out to your customers in Tokyo during their workday.

If you want to take scheduling to the next level, look for a tool that offers the ability to schedule large batches of messages at once. This will be a super useful time-saver when it comes to managing campaigns or contests that require heavy messaging around a certain period of time.

2) Geo
When it comes to interacting with your customers, those in different locations may have different needs, speak different languages or follow different trends. You’re going to want a tool that optimizes your searches and filters your searches by language to help you curate relevant content for different demographics.

3) Keywords
Social media is also an effective way for businesses to keep their finger on the pulse. Setting up keywords or search streams provide insight into what is trendy among your customers. This can help you develop a marketing strategy that focuses on customer’s lifestyles and personal preferences.

Keywords are useful for keeping track of competitors’ activities but they’re also useful for tracking brands that are complementary to your offering. If your product is often purchased in conjunction with another product, keep an eye on the complementary product’s social media activity to take advantage of promotions or recent sales, as these are potential leads ready to be converted.

4) Collaboration
It takes two to tango especially when it comes to being social. Collaboration is key when it comes to developing and executing an effective social media campaign. Ensure your social media management tool enables you to seamlessly collaborate with your team to ensure you execute an integrated social media management strategy.

5) Reporting
Gone are the days of social media purely being about ‘building buzz.’ It is now a line item in budgets as companies invest resources in these channels and there is an expectation for reports which show ROI for social media outreach.

Make sure your tool has the ability to analyze important metrics such as click-through rates on shortened links, clicks by region and top referrers. It’s also important to have access to Facebook Insights and Google Analytics.

The most effective tools will provide the ability to access in-depth granular metrics on the efficacy of your social media programs. This will allow you to determine which messages resulted in the highest number of conversions, which platform is providing the greatest return and which time of day is most effective to drive traffic.

What does it take to go Pro?
Social is here to stay and to maintain a competitive advantage, businesses need to stay abreast of this ever-evolving space. HootSuite Pro help teams engage with audiences and analyze campaigns across multiple social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn from one secure web-based dashboard.

- See more at: http://reelwebdesign.com/blog/2012/12/12/5-must-haves-for-social-media-management/#sthash.Zt5EmQnj.HYBVpuyH.dpuf

Email Is The New Pony Express–And It’s Time To Put It Down

BY RYAN HOLMES
Source: http://www.fastcompany.com/3002170/email-new-pony-express-and-its-time-put-it-down

Email, like paper letters delivered by horseback, has become an unproductivity tool and may just be the biggest time killer in the modern workplace. Here’s where companies are headed next.

In early 2011, the CEO of a French IT company issued an usual memorandum. He banned email. Employees were discouraged from sending or receiving internal messages, with the goal of eradicating email within 18 months. Critics scoffed. Workers rebelled. But Thierry Breton, the CEO of Atos, has stuck to his guns, reducing message volume by an estimated 20%. His company, by the way, has 74,000 employees in 48 countries.

Email is familiar. It’s comfortable. It’s easy to use. But it might just be the biggest killer of time and productivity in the office today. I’ll admit my vendetta is personal. I run a company,HootSuite, which is focused on disrupting how the world communicates using social media. Yet each day my employees and I send each other thousands of emails, typing out addresses and patiently waiting for replies like we were mailing letters on the Pony Express.

As we’ve expanded from 20 to 200 employees over the last two years, the headaches have only grown. Anyone with an inbox knows what I’m talking about. A dozen emails to set up a meeting time. Documents attached and edited and reedited until no one knows which version is current. Urgent messages drowning in forwards and cc’s and spam.

It’s not just me who thinks email’s days are numbered. Among 18-24 year olds, time spent on webmail has declined 34% in the last year alone, and nearly 50% since 2010, according tocomScore’s 2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focus report.

So what’s the solution? Our idea: Turn email into a conversation. Get rid of the inbox. Build an online platform where departments can post and respond to messages on central discussion threads, Facebook-style. Then integrate that with Twitter and Facebook so great ideas can be broadcast–with a click–to the world. Conversations isn’t a revolutionary concept; it’s a duh-it’s-about-time concept. And it’s worked for us and 5 million clients. A year from now, we may well be reading email its last rites. Here’s why:

Email has become an unproductivity tool. Right now, the typical corporate user spends 2 hours and 14 minutes every day reading and responding to email, according to McKinsey’s 2012 Social Economy report. Our inboxes have become an open door for anything and everything, some of which is pure spam and most of which is neither time-sensitive nor relevant in the here and now. The average business user wades through 114 emails a day, which works out to 41,610 messages a year (or one email every 12.6 minutes of your life).

Email is linear, not collaborative. Email was never intended for collaborative work. Try setting up a meeting time with a group on email and that becomes painfully obvious. Messages flood in, getting out of sync and leaving users scrolling madly to track the conversation. A better option: Facebook-style discussion threads where multiple employees can post, reply, and view centrally in real time.

Email is not social. Email is where good ideas go to die. Brilliant messages race across the Internet at light speed only to end up trapped in an inbox. The clear advantage of social platforms is that content is shared and reshared among whole communities of followers, triggering the viral cascade that makes social media so powerful. Using internal networks and discussion threads instead of email, enterprises can instantly broadcast innovation and crowdsource solutions company-wide. HootSuite’s Conversations takes this up a notch, enabling employees to amplify select messages to Twitter and Facebook, sharing ideas with the world at a click.

Your inbox is a black hole. You may be able to quickly and easily search your inbox, but odds are the rest of your department or company can’t. And all that locked-up knowledge represents a massive, wasted reserve of internal expertise. Office productivity could be improved by up to 14% just by moving those emails to a searchable, central discussion thread, message board, or wiki, according to a 2012 McKinsey report.

Sharing documents on email is a joke. Let’s set aside the inconvenience of uploading and attaching files, over and over again. The real trouble with sharing on email starts when multiple recipients download and modify a document. It’s all too easy to lose track of which revision is the latest, leading to redundant edits and wasted time. An infinitely better solution is to put a single document in one, shared location accessible to all stakeholders. Using tools like Google Drive, history can be tracked and multiple collaborators can edit simultaneously.

Seeking the path of least resistance, the next generation of office workers are finding better, faster, easier ways to communicate. It’s about time.