Back to Basics: 10 Facebook Marketing Tips to Get Off to a Good Start

by Nicole Munoz

Facebook continues to grow amongst most demographics. It’s widely used by many target audiences and can be an effective tool to grow your audience, and ultimately your sales. Use this checklist to make sure you don’t miss a step as you plan and implement your Facebook Marketing Strategy.

#1 Choose a Facebook name that is consistent with your business. Customers will be able to easily identify your business Facebook page and profile.

#2 Create a vanity URL that you can use to promote your Facebook page. For example, Facebook.com/yourbusinessname is professional, consistent and apparent to your customers. (Go to Admin panel, Edit page, and Update info to set your Vanity URL).

#3 Design and brand your Facebook page with current photos, logo and other images that are representative for the business. Upload a stylish cover photo and a header image that are also relevant to your business. Your tagline should be present on your Facebook page (usually in the cover photo).

#4 Create an “About” page that embraces the company brand, voice, and communicates current and relevant information about your business.

#5 Create a goal for your Facebook page and social media marketing activities. You can use Facebook to:

Drive traffic to your site
Provide valuable content
Promote/sell products
Build opt-in list

#6 Establish a message for your Facebook page that supports your goals for Facebook marketing.

This message supports your brand and is authentic.
This message is engaging and provides value to your friends and followers.

#7 Create a content schedule that provides a steady and consistent flow of valuable content that supports your goals and message.

#8 Set aside time each day so that you can consistently connect with potential prospects and build your followers while building your business and reaching your marketing goals. For example, set aside fifteen minutes two times each day to share, comment, and post. Schedule one post for each day of the week.

#9 Integrate Facebook with other marketing tactics including:

Blog
Website
Email signature
Email marketing
Other social media pages

#10 Leverage technology and automate the process as much as possible. For example, your weekly email newsletter is posted on Facebook.

#11 Create systems to test and track your Facebook marketing results. Set tests for:

Content
Delivery/posting time
Clicks
Subscribes
And measure the results as they relate to your specific Facebook goals.

Facebook can be a useful tool to connect with your prospects and begin to build a community around your business. Create your message, follow through, and track your results.

Pinning for Fun? Why Not Becoming a Pinterest Expert

by Nicole Munoz

Pinterest Best Practices for Beginners and Not Only

Pinterest is providing amazing results for small business owners who have jumped on the bandwagon. If you want to use Pinterest to gain influence then you need to be strategic in your actions. As you get started with Pinterest understand what you’re doing and do it with purpose. Pinterest can drive traffic to your website, products, services and more, but you need to go about it the right way.

#1. Know Your Audience

It’s not enough to simply know how to use Pinterest. You also need to learn how to conduct market research. It’s an imperative, if you want to understand your audience. If you don’t know who you want to influence, it’s hard to know how to proceed. Take the time to research your market so that you know who they are, what they like, and what they like to do on Pinterest. Your market is the group of people who are interested in the products or services that you want to promote. The products and services that you want to promote should be solutions to your niche market. If you can provide solutions to a group of people that really work you are bound to become influential.

#2. Set Realistic and Specific Goals

Before you get started with creating even your first board, it’s important to understand what you hope to accomplish with the board. Do you want to get more followers, get more traffic, cause some other action? Know what it is so that you can create relevant boards. Once you know what your goal is, write it down in a very specific way. Remember that a goal should be possible and specific. Your goal in this case is to become an authority, or influential person to your niche using Pinterest as the catalyst. Write down what you are going to do on Pinterest to achieve those goals. How many boards are you going to create per week or month? What will the topics of the boards be? How will you create the boards? Will you hire someone, or will you do it yourself? What data will you use to create the boards? Be specific, and you will succeed.

#3. Define Your Boards by Subject, Topic or Category

Each board should have its own topic or subject. That’s how you keep them organized and relevant to different segments of your audience. Every board should be relevant to your overall audience. Just like you have different categories on your blog, or pages on your website, so you should also have different boards on Pinterest. Start with four or five different boards covering the different categories that you have determined are important to your audience. Most people will not follow every board. They will choose a specific board to follow. Once you create a board, ensure that you keep it updated on a regular basis. Starting with more than four or five boards will be too much work because you want to keep boards updated so choose your categories and topics carefully.

#4. Be Visually Creative with Your Boards

Depending on what type of business you have it can sometimes be hard to come up with creative ideas. In order to be super creative use mind maps and other brainstorming ideas to come up with ways to present your information graphically. The more original pins you can create the better. If your pins are created by you then it will show as you being the originator so when it’s shared people have the opportunity to find you. Your creativity will really matter when it comes to creating boards. Pinterest, as you know, is a very visual medium. You’ll have to think outside the box to create images that represent the message you want to send to your audience. If you want people to pin your blog posts, ensure that you’ve added a creative visual element to encourage pinning.

#5. Engage and Be Engaging with Your Followers

Pinterest is social media, and the idea of social media is to be, guess what? Social. Therefore, interaction is key getting people to re-pin your Pinterest content and to follow you. When you think about social media realize that it’s a conversation you’re having with your audience on a regular basis. You wouldn’t just ignore comments made to your face, don’t ignore them made on Pinterest. Don’t just communicate on your own boards either. Engage with others on their boards, and mention people by name when relevant. It’s a great way to keep the conversation going, and bring other people in. Sharing, commenting, and being social is what social media is all about so ensure that you are engaging, in more ways than one.

#6. To Be Super Influential Seek To Be The Hub

Being seen as information nucleus of information that’s interesting to your audience should be one of your goals when seeking to influence others. To succeed, you need to study what they need to know and want to know. That may mean creating new boards, but it might also mean curating other boards of interest for your audience. You can not only curate other people’s information, but your own too. People are very visual and this lets you curate the information in a beautiful way. If you are super organized, and only allow the best quality information to be on your boards, you are creating an image for yourself too. The image of an someone who can influence others.

#7. Give Credit Where Credit is Due

When you use an image or idea from someone else, always be kind and credit the information. If they have a “pin it” button on their site you can assume they want you to pin it, but it’s nice to give credit where credit is due. When Pinterest started there was a lot of buzz about plagiarism and copyright infringement. You can avoid any problems with this by following a few simple rules. Only re-pin other people’s stuff, don’t down load it to your computer, then upload it back as an original board or pin. Try taking your own pictures, or using only legal images in the boards and pins that you create. Be sure to credit properly all images that you use. Don’t separate an image from the creator without express permission to do so. Even when given permission it’s a good idea to credit the source. (Note: Watermark your own creations with your name and website information to avoid being copied.)

#8. Nothing’s Done until the Numbers are Evaluated

It’s kind of like the saying that “Nothing is complete until the paperwork is done.” Well, paperwork always involves numbers. As such, nothing can be deemed successful (or a failure) without studying the metrics. Look at how many followers you get for different actions. How many people re-pin something you’ve pinned. Can you figure out why they re-pin one thing over another? How many people pin a blog post with no images compared to an infographic? How many click-throughs you receive and any other factor that can help you determine the effectiveness of your boards is an important metric to understand. Pinterest has its own analytics tools today that are quite good at giving you the information you need. That combined with Google Analytics and there isn’t much you can’t determine by looking at the numbers. If you want to be a real influencer and an authority in your niche, it’s important to know what is working and what is not working. Getting started with a goal in mind, and developing your Pinterest presence over time will reap many more benefits than going in without a clue as to the direction you want to go. Having goals and understanding your topic and your audience will go far in helping you pin your way to influence. One way to become more influential is to build your following.

How to Become an Influencer on Pinterest

by Nicole Munoz

Pinterest began as a beta site just a few short years ago as a way for others to share what they love and create virtual bulletin boards for all their favorite things. Now users are amazed with the potential of the site and can’t wait to share with their friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, and acquaintances. As a smart person with information to share that will be of interest to your niche audience, you stand to benefit from the millions of members that visit the site each month.

In order to pin your way to influence keep these takeaways in mind:

Don’t Advertise

Be more than just a company advertising a business. Think beyond advertising to create interesting and entertaining infographics and visual elements to share with your audience that they will enjoy sharing too. Create information that will pull heart strings, entice a giggle, or make people think of the data you provide in a new way.

Be Social

Social media, is after all, supposed to be social. Become involved in Pinterest and with the users of Pinterest. Communicate with the other users and all the creators of amazing and awe-inspiring pinboards. Share other people’s pinboards, and make useful and smart comments. It will only enhance your experience and increase your influence.

Be Creative

Use the virtual pinboard site as a way to express your creative side both as a business owner and as a lover of beautiful things. Even if you’re an accountant, there are ways to express numerical data in new and visual ways that will make people take notice. Let your imagination flow.

Remember your Audience

When using Pinterest for marketing and advertising a product, service, website, blog, or build influence among a group — always keep the viewers and consumers in mind. Put yourself in their place every step of the way, and imagine what you would want to learn from your time on Pinterest. Remember to think in terms of solving problems and answering questions and your influence will grow.

Check Your Metrics

By knowing what works (and what doesn’t work) you’ll be better able to determine where to spend your time. If you check the numbers, you won’t be mistaken and waste your time on creating pinboards that no one pays attention to. Being aware of metrics will help you to increase your potential and become a true influential leader in your niche on Pinterest.

The Twitter Impact on Business Research

by Nicole Munoz

Twitter is more than a social media tool. It is a search tool in its own right. Businesses can find hot topics and join and conversation so that they stay on top of chat trends, track the habits of their influencers, engage with their followers and also spy on the competition.

Build Brand Management

Don’t leave your branding to chance. Following a plan is more likely to help you quickly attract and secure the minimum 1,000 followers you really need in order to gain accurate tracking results. You can use third-party Twitter tools like HootSuite and Twitalyzer to help manage your brand and find out what people are saying about it, as well as how your brand is perceived – but before this will work, you need to make sure you’ve created a strong Twitter presence. Fill out as much of your profile as possible, using your audience’s most popular search keywords; and brand with your business name.

Register using your name in the “Full Name” field and your company name as the “Username”… unless you are branding individual products. In that case, register as your company name in the “Full Name” field and use your company name plus product name connected by an underscore. This not only makes it easy for you to measure Twitter stats for each product or niche; it makes your product or niche Twitter accounts searchable.

Use common sense and keep your target audience in mind, when creating company Twitter accounts. And since 50% of all customers follow a brand for customer service, be sure to create a customer service Twitter account too, if your business involves more than a handful of clients.

List your business Twitter account in Twitter directories such as Social Brand Index, We Follow and Twellow, making sure you place yourself in the correct category, to increase your chances of showing up in search results for those categories.

Don’t forget mobile users…

Twitter’s own official blog reported earlier high engagement from mobile users in the UK, who find Twitter easier to handle on mobiles than other social networks. The blog study’s conclusion: Mobile users follow brands and almost half these users recommend brands they follow – so if your target market members are mobile users, you can’t afford to be casual about your Twitter presence.

Once you have set up strong Twitter Profiles for your company accounts, researching activity around your own brand becomes much easier, with more accurate results.

Do Topic Research

Face it – finding topics by checking out the “What’s Trending” widget doesn’t often result in a relevant match for your business.

And people who throw references to currently trending celebrities into business blog posts are more often than not doing themselves no favors at all, since they are likely to attract:

Zero business searchers
Annoyed searchers looking for news about their favorite celebrity – only to find one skimpy reference something along the lines of “Lady Gaga has the right idea about marketing”.

To find trends relevant to your business: Use Twitter’s own Advanced Search page.

Simply enter your keywords, and view the results.

Notice the wide, practical and useful varieties of search parameters the Advanced Search function offers:

Words – includes hashtags, exact phrases, any or all of “these words” and “written in”
People – you can search particular tweets to and from specific accounts, as well as searching tweets mentioning specific accounts
Places – use geo-targeting by searching tweets mentioning specific places and nearby locations
Other – you can also specify that posts you are searching for be positive, negative or questions. And you can include retweets.

Other Top Tips for Topic Research:

If you want to be counted among Twitter’s top influencers, you need to know that Twitter itself measures this by the number of retweets you generate. One quick way to increase your retweets: Keep your tweets shorter than 100 characters. And ask your followers to “Please retweet”.

Keeping track of who retweeted you and what they retweeted can not only help you monitor your brand, but give you valuable clues as to which subjects (via your tweets) are “hot” for your followers (and target market); which ones make them interact with your tweets – and which ones leave them cold.

Manage Your Followers

Another thing that can hurt you in today’s online climate: Going for numbers over quality, when it comes to attracting followers. Every spammer you leave on your account will hurt it in Twitter’s eyes.

Get into the habit of also checking for new followers daily through your “@Connect” menu tab.

By all means add people when they follow you – but do it manually. Check them out first to make sure you haven’t inadvertently added an auto-spammer who never personally engages.

Go through your account and get rid of anyone who doesn’t fit your niche or actually engage with you.

Find New Audiences

You don’t even have to leave Twitter to find new audiences. In addition to all the usual prompted ways to connect (searching your email accounts, for example), there are third-party sites and apps you can use, as well as searching hashtags and using Advanced Search.

But there are a few key actions that top Twitter users seem to take. Before chasing off after the latest app, make sure you have these set in place:

Tweet focused, fascinating content.

People are tired of serial retweeters and spammy marketing messages. Make sure that whatever you share – whether or not it is personal or promotional – speaks directly to your target listener, firmly hooking into her areas of interest. Keep your company mission or goal as central to every tweet. Before hitting the button, ask yourself “does this detract from what I want to portray… or is it in alignment?”

Make sure your tweet is unique and personal (in that it doesn’t sound as if it was written by a robot).

This tweet was chosen by Twitter as a “Top Tweet” – meaning that out of all the tweets created to promote (in this case) a particular hashtag, this one was the tweet retweeted most – and, if you remember, retweeting increases your Twitter status.

Now you’re ready to find a bigger, targeted audience – and they are ready to find you.…

Search through authority blogs you regularly read. Look for people who comment or guest-author.

Follow the blog administrator or creator. (Particularly follow the Twitter Advertising Blog, since this tells you what makes money for Twitter – and therefore will be important for your own Twitter research.

Join Twitter Chats. This is a great way to become known and find quality people to follow. There are several sites like TweetReports displaying the latest TweetChat schedules – both multiple subject and niche-specific.

Create a Chat. Don’t just wait to find the right one – create a regular, weekly TweetChat specifically for existing subscribers – and ask them to share it. Don’t forget to put your TweetChat name and hashtag right in your Profile Summary.
Join Groups: LinkedIn Groups for strictly business; Facebook for a wide selection of special interests and Yahoo Groups for hobby niches.

Again, Groups allow you to become known – which lead to “follows”. So be sure to include your Twitter handle in your Profile and posts or post signatures (if allowed).

Join Forums or Membership sites that are built around your niche. Provide quality comments, answers and questions. Be there – daily and regularly.

And – again – include your Twitter handle wherever it’s allowed within those sites.

Searching and using Hashtags

Hashtags can be a powerful tool, when it comes to letting your ideal follower know you exist and allowing you to find quality people to follow

Surprisingly, a recent report released by Business Insider Intelligence on factors affecting follower growth cited the use of hashtags (along with tweeting negative emotions and talking about oneself) as one of three factors adversely affecting account growth.

Who overuses hashtags? Anyone who inserts more than two in a post – and uses hashtags in every post.

Two hashtags should be the maximum you ever use in a post.

Using Twitter as a business research tool doesn’t just mean finding out facts on Twitter: it means that you, your company and your products should be researchable too. The best strategy involves starting out with focused branding. This will quickly allow you to research the impact of your own brand within Twitter, as well as your competitors’ brands.

12 Vital Tips for Conducting a Successful Webinar

by Nicole Munoz

It’s important to understand how to conduct a successful webinar. Your actual tasks will depend on your technology and the help that you have but in general these tips will be important to learn if you want to conduct a profitable webinar. Consider these webinar best practices.

Remember Time Zones

It happens that sometimes people get mixed up with the time zones and miss a webinar even if they’re speakers or the organizer. Ensure that you understand the time zones and that your computer is set correctly. You can use Google Local Time Feature to find out what time it is elsewhere. In the search box type “time location”.

Remind Everyone

Using the email list software set up reminders that count down to the event for both attendees and speakers. You can even insert reminders to the speakers to “send tease to your list” or “hey today your content is due send it to xyz now please” and so forth. Reminders never hurt anyone and will ensure a better turn out all the way around.

Practice, Practice, Practice

You and the other presenters need to practice with the technology before the event. Do a complete dress rehearsal. You can even invite a special audience for the dress rehearsal to make it even more complete with audience participation.

Test the Technology

Ensure that you have good Internet service and that your speakers understand the Internet requirements. Often, using wireless can mess up VOIP, sometimes it’s okay. It depends on what technology you chose. Read their requirements and conduct a test to ensure it works. Test your local tech too, such as your speakers, ear phones, desk top and anything else you plan to use during the presentation.

Choose a Moderator

This can be your webinar specialist, you, or someone else who is good at time management. The moderator is going to be responsible for ensuring that everyone sticks to their time limits and Q & A doesn’t get too carried away. Sometimes moderators are also in charge of technology, so be sure that everyone knows what they’re doing.

Provide an Agenda

In one of your reminders before the event provide an agenda to the attendees. They’ll appreciate seeing what is going to happen during the event and it will get them excited to attend.

Start on Time

All speakers and presenters should arrive early to the event even though it’s a webinar so that you can start exactly on time. Guests will not like having to wait on anyone to get started. If someone is late, have a plan in place to switch the order of events. Attendees will get frustrated and leave if you wait around for people who are tardy.

Be Human

One thing that webinars sometimes miss that in person events don’t is the humanity. Sometimes people giving a presentation online are more stilted and guarded than they would be in person because they are taking in the audience’s reaction. With an online webinar you cannot see anyone’s face. A good suggestion is to suggest that each speaker / presenter post a mirror where they can see themselves talking so that they can maintain a human connection. Sounds weird, but it works.

Use Video

Mix up presentations from just PowerPoint to other types of information by adding in some video to your presentation. A lot of webinar software today allows the group to watch and hear YouTube.com videos or to upload video to the system for hearing and viewing. This will create more interest and make the presentations more exciting.

Open Group Chat

Many webinar software offers the ability for the attendees to chat among themselves during the event. The reason this is a great feature is because it offers the social proof that other people are there attending, right now. People will feel part of a group instead of alone. This is one huge way in which webinars different from in person events where talking during the event is discouraged.

Ask for Audience Participation

It can get boring sitting there looking at a screen. If each speaker offers a short Q & A session after their presentation the audience will feel more awake and in tune to the event. Most webinar software also allows for instant surveys and polls to be performed during the event, make use of these at least once per speaker for best results. Plan in advance how many questions, or pick a time limit and stick to it. The moderator should be in charge of ensuring that the time is managed appropriately.

Get Assistance

It can’t be said enough but putting on an event, even a webinar can be challenging and time consuming. Depending on your own comfort zone you may want help with the technology, or you may need help getting all the materials prepared to the highest possible quality, or both. There are many virtual assistants who specialize in webinars who are ready and willing to help.

By incorporating these webinar best practices into your planning, you’ll create a situation where you cannot have anything but a successful, profitable webinar. After all, you want to succeed with your webinar.

How to Determine Your Webinar Topic

by Nicole Munoz

To choose an effective topic study your target audience. It’s important to understand all the demographics of your audience in order to be able to get the topic right. It also helps to be up-to-date about industry news. You can also survey your current audience to determine topics that they’d choose to attend. To get started thinking of different topics, try brainstorming some ideas by asking these questions.

What are the problems that you can address and solve that might cause them to be interested in your webinar?

Do you already have a blog post or an eReport that involves a numbered list of tips to help solve a particular problem that your target market has?

Do you have some case studies that describe client success following an eCourse or eBook that you’ve put out previously?

Are you aware of current trends within your industry that you would be comfortable expounding on in a webinar?

Do you have a new product launching soon?

Any topic that fits your niche audience and addresses and solves the problems that they experience will be a success. Remember always, that in anything you do for your audience, it’s about them, not you. They want solutions. If you can keep that fact straight as you formulate your topic and the information that you will present, you’ll have a very successful webinar.

Find Speakers & Presenters and Keep Them Organized

It’s really uncomfortable to do a hour long webinar on your own. Plus, it can get boring to the attendees. So, instead of doing that find speakers and presenters for your webinar. More speakers will mean more information, plus more attendees because each speaker will attract their own audience. This works best if the speakers aren’t direct competitors but promote complementary products and services to the same target audience.

Look to Your Network

You can find speakers in a variety of ways depending upon your topic. Some topics are easier to come up with speakers than others. But you can find them through your networks, and plan the event together, or you can plan the event, and the topic, and then invite people whom you’ve identified as movers & shakers within your target audience community. It is highly suggested that for your first multi-speaker webinar that you plan it in advance and invite the presenters.

Set Expectations in Advance

When you invite anyone to present it’s important to set expectations in advance with some kind of formal agreement. It’s a good idea for you to have content approval and deadlines for participants to produce. In addition, set dates for and require attendance to practice sessions. If you have open communication and set expectations from the beginning you’ll have few problems.

Send Information ASAP

If you are going to use any collaboration software, or any other software that requires special logins it’s important to send them to the presenters as soon as you get them. If you’ve received questions from your target audience from your email marketing campaigns your presenters need to know what they are. Any information that you should share, do it immediately so that the presenters have plenty of time to act on it.

Keep Open Communication

Set up a shared calendar for all speakers for the event. In addition, it will help to have a space for all information, handouts, special offers, and presentations to be uploaded. A shared Dropbox might work, or a project management system like Basecamp will work well too. Add them to an automated email list that will send out reminders and information leading up to the date of the event so that no one forgets to show up or do their part. This is a great way to put on a professionally produced webinar event.

By choosing people that you know, or know about, setting expectations in advance of them even agreeing to participate in the event and keeping communication open throughout you’re sure to experience few problems with the presenters for your event.

Content Planning Ideas for Facebook Marketing

by Nicole Munoz

The first order of business is the content plan. Facebook marketing is all about the content that you will share with your audience. Without a plan you will be aiming in the dark and be in danger of spending more than 10 minutes a day. Use a calendar like Google Calendar in which to help you make your plan.

In addition to scheduling in the time that you need to work on Facebook each day, write in the subject matter, titles, and even outlines when a burst of creativity hits you for content that you’ll be sharing with Facebook.

Let’s talk about the different types of content that you will share and promote using Facebook.

Blog Posts — Every blog post that you write on your blog or other blogs related to your Facebook Page should be shared via Facebook. Don’t just post a link to the content, post a blurb about the link, and ask people to read, like and share. Without this call to action included most people will look at it, and do nothing else. If you do automate sharing these blog posts, comment on your own post to get the interaction ball going.

Images — Using a software program like Gimp or Photoshop alter images to include a relevant quote and a watermark for your Facebook Page, and then post and share it with others. Again, post something related to the image for people to read. Ask people to comment, like and share. The reason you want a watermark on the image is to show where it originated. These images have a good chance of going viral.

Infographics — These are simply images that are longer and bigger that show the results of a survey or other information that is put together as a visual representation of the data. Infographics have a large chance of going viral, so also watermark infographics that you create. Again, explain the graphic, ask readers to comment, like and share.

Videos — Naturally these videos will live on another space like Youtube.com and your blog. You can link directly from YouTube.com or from your blog but you should also be sharing videos on your Facebook page. People love watching video. Your videos should be short and to the point, and as usual you should post a blurb about the video and include a call to action to watch, comment and share.

General Update Posts — These are not accompanied by an image or graphic but are just general posts that you start to get a discussion going. You might ask your audience a question, post a poll, or other information in order to get a response from your audience.

Comments — You need to comment on other people’s information on their pages too. By commenting haring, and helping to disseminate information from other people’s pages using your business account you can find more people to “like” your page. Make sure your comments are relevant and useful.

Depending on your target audience and your niche, make everything relevant. This is not the time to post about troubles at home, or potty habits of your children. Unless of course, that is what your niche is about. With each type of content that you will post on Facebook include an explanation or teaser and a call to action. Without the call to action, your readers may not follow through.

Create a Comprehensive Plan

Your content plans should include a goal for the content, how you will share the content, and when and how you will share the content. There are different goals for each type of content that you share. You may want to get more likes, more shares, attract more subscribers, or educate your audience on the topics of your choice. You may also want to encourage blog visitors to get more traffic, or to make more sales for a product or service. Every post to Facebook needs to have a purpose. Without a purpose don’t post it.

Know Your Purpose

You can have numerous goals at once, but you might want to start with just one or two goals such as growing your audience and increasing traffic to your blog. Once you master these, you can move on to more goals. With any goal you make, always take a step back and assess whether or not your actions are having the impact you desired.

Know When and What to Post

First decide what days of the week you want to post to Facebook, and decide what type of content you’ll be posting on which days. For instance if you’ve chosen to spend 10 minutes a day 7 days a week, you could devote one day to each type of content using the 7th day to assess everything.

Be Consistent

Finally, if you’re going to embark on Facebook in 10 minutes a day, be consistent. Spend the ten minutes enacting your plans. Avoid getting side tracked on irrelevant topic discussions and game playing. Spend the ten minutes following your plan to the letter. If you’ve created a comprehensive plan, you’ll be successful.

10 Easy Tips to Improve Your Social Media Management Today

by Nicole Munoz

Social media management is one of those skills that needs to be highly personalized depending on the type of company and type of strategy you’re working with. A Fortune 500 company is going to need very different tools and approaches than a small business just starting to make its way in the world.

In order to successfully manage your social media, you need to implement proven strategies that build customer connection, keep people engaged and keep the process streamlined in the meantime. You need to be able to do things efficiently, while still keeping things personal.

Here are ten ways to help you do this, no matter what kind of company you’re working with.

Tip #1: Encourage Your Audience to Participate in Other Platforms

Try to get your audience onto different kinds of platforms. If someone reads your blog, try to get them on your Facebook page. If someone follows you on Twitter, try to get them on your email list.

Why should you encourage cross-platform participation?

It gives you multiple ways to followup with someone. You’re more likely to get their attention, since they’re seeing you everywhere they look.
You’re less likely to lose them. If you just had them reading your blog, they might one day forget to check back. However, if you also had their email, you’ll be able to continually follow up.
It helps build community. People who participate will often be happy to participate in comments, forums, twitter and Facebook if you give them the chance.

Don’t spent a lot of time hard selling your various platforms. Just let people know what kinds of platforms are available every once in a while.

Tip #2: Cross Post Your Best Content

Take advantage of your best content. If you wrote something that’s funny, creative, original or useful, cross-post it to your various different platforms.

It’s important that you do keep your platforms different enough that it’s worth it for people to be on multiple platforms. If your Facebook page is just reposts from your blog, it’s not really its own standalone platform.

However, when you create something that’s truly original and truly noteworthy, make sure everyone in your network knows about it. Post it to all your platforms. Just don’t overdo it and make sure you write something personal to each platform, rather than just copy and paste.

Social media integration tools can help you cross post to different platforms quickly and easily. You can access all your different social networks quickly and easily from one place.

Tip #3: Survey Your Audience Every Once in a While

It’s possible that you’re so in tune with your audience that you know exactly what they want at any given time. However, it’s much more likely that there will be things your audience wants that you simply won’t be able to predict.

Get in the habit of surveying your audience every once in a while. There are a couple different ways you can do this.

First, you can simply send personal message to people you have a connection to and ask what they like about your content and what they’d like to see more of. Use social media integration tools to spot power-fans and ask for their opinion directly.

Alternatively, you can use tools like Survey Monkey to create a survey, then post it to your social network.

Both of these methods work equally well. What’s important is that you stay in touch with what your audience wants, beyond just what you think they want.

Tip #4: Consider Your Users’ Time Zones

If you’re not using social media integration, it’s very tough to consider your users’ time zones. You post whenever you happen to be online, whenever you can.

However, with social media integration tools, you have the luxury of using software to post whenever you want to. All you need to do is figure out the best times to post, then schedule your posts to go live during those times.

Typically the best times to post are early in the morning, between 9 and 11 am, late in the afternoon, between 4pm and 6pm and late at night, between 9p and 11pm. This allows you to get people in their morning Facebook check, their evening check and their late night check.

Use tools like Facebook Insights and Google Analytics to figure out where the majority of your followers come from. Are they US-based? If not, where in the world are they? If they are US-based, are they primarily west coast or east coast?

Once you know your audience, time your posts accordingly.

Also, track the response rates, virality and engagement of your own post times. See if your audience responds better during certain times of day.

Tip #5: Manage it as a Team

Don’t treat your social media as a solo endeavour. Often time’s the best way to really increase engagement is to work on your social media as a team.

There are a couple different approaches to this.

One approach is to let everyone post under their own name. This allows people to build a bit of a personal brand within your brand. Your readers can get to know different people on your staff and build relationships with each of them individually.

This is a fantastic way to manage a social media team if you have a team of people who’re all great at expressing themselves. However, if only a couple of you are good at creating posts that people respond well to, then you might want to use the second approach.

The second approach is to have your social media messages crafted by just one or two people, but enroll the help of your staff to manage everything else.

Have someone watch the analytics. Have people look out for and respond to direct messages and @replies. It’s impossible for one person to keep track of all of these all the time, unless it’s your full time job. If you have a team watching out for you however, you’ll be able to respond to inquiries much faster collectively.

Tip #6: Measure and Improve Your Virality

Your virality is a measure of how often people who see your content like, share, comment or in other ways cause your content to appear in their feed.

How often do people interact with your content? What kind of content do they interact with? Do people tend to share things you post in video, text or audio format? Do people tend to respond to one topic of discussion more than others?

Figuring these things out will enable you to cater to the rest of your content to your users’ needs and wants.

Use tools like Facebook Insights, as well as various social media integration tools to figure out what kind(s) of content your users like. Then create more of that kind of content, as well as experiment with offshoots of that kind of content.

Tip #7: Automate Routine Tasks

Are there things in your social media strategy that you find yourself repeating by hand over and over and over again? Chances are, someone has already figured out how to automate that. All you need to do is find the right tool.

For example, let’s say you’re regularly logging in to check your stats on your social networks. What if you could automate that by having an email sent to you instead?

Or say you always post your email posts to your Twitter feeds. Why not use a tool that’ll allow you to post your emails to your Twitter, without having to create a shortened link and copy and paste by hand?

The APIs provided by Twitter and Facebook are highly versatile. Developers can create apps that do just about anything and interact with your accounts in just about any way. Because of this, just about any task that needs to be automated has been automated by independent developers looking to create software that spreads on the internet.

Save yourself time and increase your efficiency by identifying repetitive tasks and looking for ways to automate those tasks.

Tip #8: Don’t Overlook Built-In Tools

When people think of social media integration, they often think of tools like Hootsuite or Tweet Deck that have been created by outside developers. However, there are actually quite a few integration tools that have been created by the social networks themselves. Don’t overlook these tools – They’re some of the best.

For example, did you know you can post to your Facebook account from your Twitter account just by adding the #fb hashtag? All you need to do is install the Selective Tweets app from within your Facebook.

You can do the same thing from LinkedIn with the #li tag. You don’t need to install any applications. All you need to do is enable Twitter reposting from within your LinkedIn settings.

The vast majority of social media tools, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest and LinkedIn all have social sharing and social media integration tools built in. Look into these tools. If you can’t find what you’re looking for in outside tools, it might be because they already exist in internal tools.

Tip #9: Manage Your Energy

Having twenty different social media accounts you need to manage across different industries is going to cause stress and be nearly impossible to handle in the long run. Try to consolidate your social media profiles whenever possible.

Social media integration tools make it easier to manage multiple accounts. However, if you have too many accounts, it’s still going to be too much to handle – Integration tools or not. Just keeping track of all your different accounts and who’s actively following what is going to be immensely difficult.

It’s often better to manage just one social media feed well than to spread yourself thin over five different accounts. Keeping your attention focused will allow you to post personality-filled content as well as recent and relevant content quickly, instead of being bogged down by trying to juggle too many different threads.

Tip #10: Manage Problems and Follower Negativity

Even if you do everything in your power to do everything right, there’ll come a time when your customers will get mad at you. Perhaps it’s because a new product you released didn’t work as well as you thought it did. Perhaps they hate your new website redesign. Maybe your whole industry is shifting and people are directing their negativity towards you.

Whatever the case may be, it’s crucial that you respond to these issues quickly. When people push at or attack your brand, it’s actually an opportunity. If you respond fast and do so authentically, people will respect you more and become more loyal. On the other hand, if you don’t respond or respond in a mechanical way, people will lose respect for you.

Think of it as a challenge rather than an attack. If your audience really wasn’t interested in what you have to offer anymore, they would have just left. Instead, they’re sticking around to give you negative feedback. If you take that feedback, incorporate it and let people know they’re valued, chances are they’ll stick around.

Social media integration tools can play a big role in this. First of all, you need to spot the negative PR – quickly. Having all your feeds in one place makes this easy. One person’s negative comments is one person’s opinions. Two might be a fluke. The moment you see three or more people saying the same things, you should probably start formulating a response.

Social media tools also make it very easy to disseminate your response once you have it formulated. Instead of wasting time logging in and out of your various social media account, integration tools will allow you to post things all at once, then have your attention fully focused on tuning in to people’s responses and adjusting accordingly.
These ten tips will help you save time, save energy and improve your relationships with your customers, whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or a multi-million dollar enterprise.

Come to Marketing Blueprint Live in Del Mar, CA, April 4th-6th, to find out 5 Simple Ways to Create More Social Media Buzz, Traffic and Profits

Top 10 Benefits to Integrating Your Social Media from Nicole Munoz