Thinking of becoming a better social media manager?
More and more businesses are jumping into social media marketing jungle and looking for a help to acquire more customers through social media.
As a social media manager your No.1 goal must be building an engaging audience ideally on a place you own.
If you’re using social media for a while then you should already have an idea that how difficult is to keep your concentration because of so many social media tools out there.
It’s literally impossible for most small businesses to manage a presence on every single social media channel out there.
I have found the following mix works best for me for social media marketing.
Hope this will help you to become a better social media manager as well.
1# Run a Blog
Your blog must be your social media management hub.
Because you own your self hosted blog fully and have full control. Content you will be creating for your blog requires lots of time and energy. It’s not wise to do all that on free platforms that you don’t own.
Things you need to run your own self hosted blog:
- Get a domain name from Godaddy
- Web hosting account, bluehost is a good choice
- I prefer to have a premium theme (Presentation matters)
- E-mail auto responder. I use Aweber
- Continuous content creation (Fuel of social media management)
Types of content you can create on your business blog:
- Show how your customers using your product & service
- Acknowledge the best performers in your team
- Teach your customers how to use your product or service better
- Share photos of your community and local meet ups
- How do you handle customer complaints & disputes
- Share your latest offers / discounts
Getting new visitors to your website is really hard. Give yourself a big favour and use e-mail auto responder to capture email of as many visitors possible so you can call them to visit your blog again and again.
2# Facebook Page
We all want lots of people to like our Facebook page.
But have you ever asked yourself why some one should like your Facebook business page?
What is in it for them?
All social media channels have different culture and most people go with it. Mainly people use Facebook for fun and to share family photos. As a social media manager, you must engage with people what they like before start throwing your sales messages at them.
Updating Facebook page status 3 to 5 times a day is a good frequency to stay visible.
Here is a deal:
You should use 5: 1 bare minimum and ideally 10:1 ratio for promotions. Share 5 to 10 interesting stuff (quotes, funny / interesting pictures, etc) that your community love before throwing your own blog post.
Here is a list of few things you can use to update your Facebook status:
- Inspirational quotes
- Interesting / Funny Pictures (be careful about copyrights)
- Share other people’s stuff
- Interesting blog posts from other sources
- YouTube videos
Pictures often go really well on Facebook.
Avoid direct promotion as much as possible on Facebook. Try to create interesting blog posts on your blog, bring people from Facebook to your blog and try to sell there.
3# Twitter
Twitter’s real power lies in conversations using @replies. Twitter is called link economy and people use Twitter to find links for the source of information.
Latest news spread real quickly on Twitter.
- Follow your industry leaders
- Add them to a Twitter list
- Spend about 10 minutes daily to check how they are using Twitter
- Follow 5 to 10 people on Twitter daily
- Retweet their tweets, chat with them using @replies
- Tweet interesting links 5 to 10 times a day
- Use the same 5:1 minimum promotion ratio
- Thank people who retweet your tweets
- Reply to all @replies
There are plenty of ways of interacting with people on Twitter. Keep one thing in mind that more interaction without asking for a sale = more engagement and possible new business.
4# LinkedIn
LinkedIn is all about business networking.
There is a great potential to acquire new business opportunities if you use LinkedIn well as a social media manager.
- Optimize your LinkedIn profile fully
- Connect with as many people as you can
- Join 3 to 5 LinkedIn groups related to your industry
- Join the conversations happening in the groups
- Find 1-3 questions in the Answers sections and reply those questions
Sounds like lot of work but you can get great results if you can do above things consistently.
5# Google +
Google + is growing really fast.
Although engagement level on Google + is low but cannot ignore it because of its importance in helping you to increase the search engine rankings.
- Optimize your Google + Personal profile
- Create business page on Google +
- More Google + followers means more visibility for your content in search engines
- Follow the same promotion policy 5:1 to 10:1
- Find conversations using search feature and participate
- +1 and share content of your followers
6# YouTube
YouTube is a second biggest search engine and owned by Google.
If you are using videos to market your business then don’t go anywhere than YouTube.
- Optimize your YouTube channel
- Upload videos regularly if possible
- Learn how to fill out meta details of every video you upload to get more views
- Embed your videos within your blog posts
- Ask viewers to subscribe to your channel
Hope this will help you to simplify your social media marketing management.
Question: What is your best social media marketing mix as a social media manager? Please feel free to share in the comments below to help the community.
Photo credit: ivanpw
Hello Rana, i was looking for this kind of post from last 1 year almost where someone is covering all the major social media channels in one go and with some simple but yet powerful points, and finally i got it. and I am sure it would be really help full for me.
here i just want to ask you one question like in above post its something related to blogger point of view where he needs to share his/her content on a specific time with a mix of some other types of content. But in case if I am running a online store and have multiple products and also getting new products every day than what kind of combination i must use for Facebook page specially? Ideally if i have birthday or wedding accessories store !
Would love to see your interesting response.
Keep writing for us,
Ali
Thank you Ali for your comment.
I am glad you found finally what you was looking for. It doesn’t matter you are a blogger or running an e-commerce website. If you are looking embrace the fruits of inbound marketing, you got to produce or curate quality content on your website or blog.
On social media people don’t like sales pitches. You share engaging content with your community and try to bring them to your blog or website where you can sell them stuff.
In simple words, if you’re running a wedding assessors store and you will go on social media and only ask people to buy your stuff, they will ignore you.
But if you will create an interesting content around your products or services people will engage with you and eventually buy from you instead of you.
It’s not only bloggers need to create content. For any business it’s really to get better search engine rankings and social media following without creating quality content.
I hope this will help.
Very concise, Rana. Social media is something I’ve been putting off for a while. I stay active so that my profiles are current but find that you can lose time very easily once you’ve logged into Twitter or Facebook 🙂 A more solid strategy and schedule is definitely in need (perhaps a management/scheduling tool? Thoughts?)
Thank you Jason for sharing your thoughts. I use Hootsuite and buffer app to manage my social media activities.
Having said that, I’m not a fan of social media automation. To me social media is all about connecting with people and it’s really hard to do that with automation. 🙂
Beautiful stuff, Rana.
In the social media jungle, this really simplified and clarifies the day-to-day things that engage people. Did I miss it, or did you mention surveys/polls?
Glad you like the stuff Jason.
You can waste lots of time if you don’t have a simple social media plan. I did not include the surveys / polls. 🙂
I certainly agree with the aspects you considered when you want to become a social media manager. You must take advantage of the best social media sites because they are the ones that have millions of users and are also looking for new information to read and often procure.
I have myself seen that those who are good in social media marketing turn out to be good at blogging too. Successful blog owners are the best social media managers as they get good traffic regularly without working for long hours. I must say that lot of experience will be required for becoming a expert in social media marketing…
There are a whole heap of guides online, Rana, that are designed to help people better manage their social media but I haven’t seen one as yet that breaks up each and every social media channel and goes into them all individually in such detail. This is truly a valueable resource.
I have actually just began using LinkedIn heavy. I’ve had it for years, but neglected it. I must say it has helped my site.
We use the same Big 6 Socials to connect our social footprint. and we both like Bluehost!