Social media management isn’t just about posting and liking. If you are a small business owner or a community manager, your daily routine includes tasks such as social listening for mentions about your brand, engaging with your community, influencers, bloggers, and creating a curating content. I have written this article to share my experience with managing multiple social media accounts and the apps that have been incredibly helpful in the process. Hopefully this article will be helpful and will save you some social media marketing time 😉
Social Listening is Key
Monitoring what has been said about you and your brand on social media is necessary. Good social media listening tool allows us to react in a timely manner to our customers’ concerns and questions. It gives us the opportunity to engage in a conversation with prospective buyers and listen to feedback. Being able to thank those that have taken the time to shout us out and share their experience with us is also crucial. People appreciate when you notice them and if you care enough, you might be able to create an amazing community around your brand.
Hootsuite allows you to monitor:
- Mentions
When somebody directly uses your Twitter handle, ex. @Nimble. - Keywords
When somebody is talking about you without using “@” in front of your Twitter name or when somebody is using certain keywords you want to keep an eye on, ex. “Looking for a CRM”, “Social CRM”, “New CRM”. - Hashtags
When somebody is using a hashtag created by or relevant to your brand - Twitter lists
You can easily create streams with Twitter lists in Hootsuite. Twitter lists help us engage with the influencers in the areas of a promise of our product and stay on top of the latest trends and news in the industry. (Here’s a post about how to import Twitter lists into Nimble). - Twitter chats
A great way to keep an eye on all your favorite Twitter chats is to keep a separate tab for them in Hootsuite. Here are some of the ones we monitor: #BufferChat, #ContentChat, #HootsuiteChat, #H2HChat, #ViralChat.
- Conferences
No matter if you attend the conferences relevant to your industry or not, it is a good idea to keep an eye on the conversations people are having using the conference hashtag. Here are some of the conferences we track: #CRMEvolution, #SaaStr, #SalesKickoff, #DigitalSalesCamp, #Dreamforce, #DF16, #Inbound16, #SMMW16.
Personalization is key to any conversation
The Nimble Smart Contacts App (a browser plugin) allows me to hover over any name on any social network and see the individuals “live profile”. In a matter of seconds, it offers an information such as the person’s title, the company they work for, where they are from, where they live, etc. Relationships are created on commonalities and similarities so being armed by insights like this allows me to engage people much easier. If you take the time to personalize your messages and make people feel special, you will see great results. Here’s a whole article about how to be Nimble in Twitter, if you decide to give Nimble a try.
Don’t talk only about yourself on your social profiles
If you only talk about yourself on social, people won’t listen for very long. There’s so many smart people in the industry that create valuable content on daily basis so why not to share some of the content they created? In order to keep track of all these amazing bloggers, we need a tool that allows us to access their latest blog posts easily. We’ve been using Bundlepost for several years and even though it is not the prettiest app on the market in terms of the user interface, it works well.
Bundlepost is a great tool to store RSS feeds and curate content for multiple social media platforms at once. It even includes the author’s attribution and hashtags for you. You can curate several hundred blog posts at once, download, and upload to your favorite social media content scheduling tool. (Ex. Hootsuite, Buffer)
Schedule ahead and save time
Although Hootsuite offers the ability to schedule content on social media, we are big fans of Buffer here at Nimble. The Buffer team has done an amazing job in the past few years in building the app into a reliable solution with an easy-to-use interface and always top-notch customer service.
You have to be sharing content to be seen on social media, that’s just the way it is. For most of us, picking the right content to share on social is not our only responsibility. That’s why we need tools to help us out. There’s nothing wrong with scheduling content that you have previously picked as suitable for your social channels. Tool like Buffer can help you evenly distribute content so even people that are not in the same time zone can see it. Buffer saves you time which you can use on actually engaging with your community and/or creating your own content.
Schedule in bulks to save time
Setting some time aside every week and scheduling content to share for several days ahead can keep you focused and save you a lot of time. We use Bundlepost to create a list of blog posts and export it into a csv file. Buffer does not have a native function to bulk upload so that’s where BulkBuffer comes into play. They are not affiliated with Buffer, but it is a free application which is very easy to use. This app allows me to fill our social media queues without any manual entry.
Don’t waste time scheduling the same content over and over
It is hard to describe how happy it made me when I discovered Edgar. The search for a tool that had the ability to re-share and recycle messages that we previously had to schedule manually was over. I found it! Edgar is saving me hours every week. If you have certain messages that don’t change (such as promoting an event that happens regularly), give Edgar a try!
We also use Edgar to promote our older blog posts. Posts can be shared at a certain time and on a certain platform or you can set it up so there’s a never-ending queue of posts that are being shared and re-shared over time.
A picture says a thousand words
I used to think that it was impossible to create pretty images without having any graphic design background. Luckily, Canva came along and now everybody can create their own beautiful images on a budget. Given the amount of free designs and images they offer it is very easy to keep the costs extra low. To learn more on how to rock with Canva, check out their blog and keep an eye on their webinars.
Do you do things differently? Do you have a tip for me on how to do something better, faster, smarter? Do you want me to show you how I use something in more detail? Reach out to me anywhere on social or at [email protected].
