Lesson 28 – Managing Your Social Media

As you have been going through the past few lessons on social media, hearing the words:

1)      Engagement

2)      Interaction

3)      Consistent

You may have been thinking about where you would find the time to do this across all five of the major networks.  And then, when you think about every other component of the marketing plan that we have discussed over the last 28 days, it can be overwhelming.  A number of business owners give up before they set a plan to use the social networks to their advantage because of the amount of work that they (rightly) foresee it taking to be done for maximum effect.

Without getting to any of the advanced strategies to come later, you can worry less about this than it appears.  There are ways of managing your accounts without spending more time than you have to do so.  Additionally, there are ways to construct a plan based on the resources that you do have while you build up to the point of using all of the social networks at their full potential.

The first thing to consider is where most of your customers and prospects are.  If most of them use Twitter or Facebook, you will benefit from starting with that network and formulating a plan for interaction.  There are really only two goals to set when formulating your plan:

1)      Increase the number of leads

2)      Increase the amount of sales

This is the point where many business owners benefit from being assisted by outside consultants.  It is easy to set up the networks. It is more difficult to formulate a plan to build a profile that brings more leads and sales to the company.   However, if you choose not to formulate a plan at this stage, there are automation tools to help you manage multiple social networks.  Perhaps the best known tool and easiest to use is called HootSuite.  HootSuite will allow you to take one piece of your content and post it to all of the major networks at once.

This is probably not the kind of interaction that will maximize your time on social media, but it will help you to manage your presence until you have a plan that will lead to profit.  In our next lesson, we will introduce tracking systems for your online marketing.  Call us today so that we can show you how to manage multiple networks while also being able to access the full potential of social media.