Social media can definitely be time consuming. Thankfully for us all there’s an app for even that. They’re called social media dashboards and they’re here to help cut down on the time you’re spending maintaining all of your individual accounts. These applications are designed to get you out of your labor intensive world of multi-platform madness and welcome you to an innovative way to update, monitor and track your social media under one roof. Where to start? There are tons of these guys popping up on the web, but we recommend HootSuite. It’s a great, user friendly site with excellent online reviews. There’s also a free option out there called Threadsy if you just want to test the waters. So fear not, the pain and suffering of maintaining six social media sites is officially removed, right? Well not exactly, but it’s a really solid start! Quickly and effectively interacting with your followers online builds customer loyalty, and using a social media dashboard to do so is just smart.
In the growing world of social media, there’s something out there for everyone. There are currently upwards of 500 million active Facebook users spending collectively over 700 billion minutes per month on the site. 64% of Twitter’s users and 61% of all Facebook users are aged 35 or older*. Even the Baby Boomers are getting in on the action. Sites like Linkedin, Delicious and Classmates.com are capturing their attention and becoming very successful at growing that otherwise hard-to-reach demographic. These days, if you have a computer, you’re using some form of social media…and so are your customers!
FALSE! You are the master of your domain. When it comes to social media, there are no rules….sort of. Etiquette, yes. Rules, no. Post, tweet and update till your heart’s content and don’t worry what your neighbor is doing. Social media is a lot of things, but it’s not for “following”. You’re an expert at your craft, show it off, have fun and don’t let the @’s and #’s get you down.
If you’re spending time creating and growing social media campaigns for your business, then you want to be able to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. First, establish your overall goals for your social media. Maybe you want to increase traffic to your website, maybe you want to establish a less formal, personal connection with your customers. Whatever the reason, know that there are ways to do all of these things using social media, but that the process and measurability may change depending on those goals. Ultimately, measurability is quite simple! Create benchmarks for yourself, honor your side of the bargain (keep it up to date, purposeful and informational), and then sit back and monitor the results. You can oversee traffic, customer engagement, leads, and many more metrics – thus your social media ROI without ever having to look at an analytics dashboard.
The idea that social media is a piece of cake is another misnomer. There are no sure-fire success tactics and guidelines out there that make these platforms what we would call “easy”. The good news is that there are lots of resources to help you get started and rolling in the right direction for your business; E2 Marketing is one of them! We can help you as much or as little as you would like with your social media, taking the vast and somewhat overwhelming world of social media off your shoulders and under our wing.
*Data Source: Google Ad Planner (US demographics data)
