Social Media has now truly embraced everywhere. It’s impossible to use social communication tools without seeing companies advertising their Groupon deals on Twitter, posting images from their latest company event or expo on Facebook, or hammering their LinkedIn groups with tips and advice relating to their services or products.
Without a shadow of a doubt, companies are truly engaging in social media. Many are using it for all sorts of reasons, such as customer service and relations, product support, or just for the plain old reason of keeping customers up-to-date with what’s going on at the company internally.
However, using social media certainly has logistical issues, which increase dependant on the size of the company. Below are some tools, tips and tricks to help you streamline your business’s social media strategy, processes and activities.
Whilst this is a ‘no-brainer’ for a lot of people, you would be surprised how many companies are neglecting to set up, or at least correctly use the power that Google Analytics provides. Despite being a free tool, Google Analytics is completely uncontended and can offer unrelenting value and insight into what people do once they click those links on social media and visit your site. For instance, why not configure some goals to track how long traffic from Twitter stays on your website, and work to provide more engaging content for those visitors. See which of your tweets and posts generated the most traffic to your site or blog, or see which ones kept users hooked on an article or converting in your store. You could also set up daily reports, so that whilst your social media campaigns are running you can keep a close eye on how much traffic or ROI your activities are giving you.
2. Hootsuite
The stronger ‘multi-platform-manager’ used to be TweetDeck, but Hootsuite has shown it’s strengths in keeping up with the newly emerging and changes to social media platforms. You can use Hootsuite as your social media base, and keep track of all your company profiles on one place. Imagine being able to see who messaged you on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more at the same time, and then be able to reply to those messages quickly and conveniently. Then, you could explore scheduling… plan your campaign, and schedule hundreds of tweets in one go using the scheduling manager.
So, you can now track your campaigns via Google Analytics, and monitor and respond to communications via ManageFlitter… but how do you grow your Twitter audience? ManageFlitter provide a free platform (with a premium service providing more features) that allow you to strategically expand who you follow. For example… you might want to follow everyone located in Central London that tweets about a certain product; this can be done easily through Manage Flitter.
4. Storify
Storify allows you to collect, manage and organize tweets, messages and posts about any topic, be it online or offline, and collate them into a virtual story for your visitors to read. You know that big expo your company is talking at next week? Make sure you know the hashtag for the event, and run a live ‘story’ about what’s going on.
5. Mention
Mention is an impressive brand monitoring service, and is kind of like… the icing on the cake in relation to the rest of the tools above. You can prepare and execute the most perfect social media strategy ever, but tracking how your brand is perceived and talking about online is integral.
Explore these tools (and any others you find out there!) and merge them together to really drive your social media marketing forward. Every strategy and process is different, so work towards finding your perfect mix!
