The Forgotten Social Media Metric: You

Social Media Managers are a weird species. If you take a look at the LinkedIn profile of any real Digital Marketer or Social Media Marketer, you'll notice that their skills vary from Analytics, to Marketing and Promotions, to Client Relationships to severe alcoholism. And what's even weirder - they're actually endorsed for all of those things (especially the alcoholism).

It's no secret that there are a vast array of skills you need to succeed in social media - and that every social media marketer and community manager is constantly working at enhacing those skills and picking up some more in the process. Makes you think we should really be getting paid more! 

Looking at it from a broad perspective, the following skills are what are probably the most important "buckets" as such that community managers need to focus on:

• Interaction & People Skills
• Content Skills
• Project Management Skills
• Analytical Skills
• Crisis Management Skills
• Technical Skills
• Marketing & Promotional Skills
• Ethics

That probably covers all the aspects of community and social media management. An interesting infographic from GetSatisfaction. 

But do you as a community manager know how good you are in each of these skills? Can you honestly say that yes, you're good at Analytics, or no you're not good at Project Management?

Circus Social has put together a fairly in-depth quiz, a 40 question multiple choice one that asseses you on these very categories. The quiz has a massive question bank out of which you get 40 questions at random that give you real life social media situations with three options that you can choose from. On completing the quiz, you get a breakdown of your score by each category - how well you did in Analytics, how well you did in Project Management, how well you did in Ethics etc. It gives you an interesting insight into your strengths and weaknesses as a social media manager and gives you the major pain points where you need to focus to become a better and well rounded social media and community manager.

On being graded against other social media managers - you can actually see whether you're really lacking in a field where everyone is excelleing, or whether you're lacking in a field in which the general expertise level of social media managers is pretty low.

Sure, you can always measure how well your community is doing or how well your Facebook page and Twitter account are doing when you track engagement and re-tweets - but could it be possible that the reason you're not getting enough retweets or not getting enough engagement be because you're lacking something in Project Management and need to rethink the way you execute a campaign?

Could it be that you're lacking in Analytics - and therefore need to get better at tracking results and engagement to amplify certain parts of your content? Or could it just be that you're lacking in Marketing and Promotions as a social media manager and need to rethink how the marketing works around your brand.

There are plenty of tools out there that let you evaluate your page performance and track mentions for your brand, but maybe it's time that we take a look inside ourselves as social media managers and tried to find what part of our personality isn't making our social media campaigns work

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What Should Your Social Media Department Be Doing, Anyway?

Last September, Hubspot published an awesome article on how businesses are using social media to drum up new customers with some statistical highlights including that, between 2009 and 2012, the amount of businesses that felt Facebook marketing was critical or important for their business increased by 75%, and that 80% of surveyed social network users prefer to connect to a brand using Facebook.

The level of exposure and engagement that social media offers its users has, quite clearly, captured the attention of business owners. However social media is still a fairly new medium to market in, and businesses that set up their own social media department often have little to no clue as to what their employees should be doing. I talked with my own social media manager Heather Taylor, and we came up with three jobs that you should expect your department to be working on.

Produce good content.

SEO has become very misunderstood. A high ranking on Google is not won by repeating key phrases over and over and over again. Keywords are still an important part of SEO, but changes to search engine algorithms means that unique content needs to produced and disseminated through your various social channels. Google filters out duplicative, low-quality content, so you need good writers on your social media team. Hosting well-written posts and pages will help your search engine ranking, and posting links to those same well-written posts in your Facebook feed or Google+ page helps draw new visitors.

Monitor feeds.

Monitoring your social feeds is a big part of social media. However, having a department that stares at their computers as tweets whiz by will not help you market your brand or attract new customers. Monitoring a feed means engaging customers, showing that there is an actual person running these social profiles. No one wants to talk to a business that doesn’t care what they have to say, and part of social marketing is connecting with your customers at a level that was once nearly impossible using traditional advertisements like commercials or direct mailing. Let them inject a little bit of personality into the business’s social presence – doing so will go a long way in attracting followers and increasing your fan’s affinity for your business.

Read!

Social media employees have to stay up to date, plain and simple. Things are constantly changing in this industry, and your department needs to stay abreast of those changes, lest your social presence stagnate. Being an active member of a community of social media professionals, like Social Media Today, makes staying relevant a lot easier as that community is constantly tracking, and informing other members, of changes. It also pays to network with other companies and departments through the comments section, or by re-tweeting certain articles, as they can help increase your own business’s exposure. Just try and keep the outside articles that you do plug relevant to your business. After all, it would probably seem odd if a cupcake shop started randomly tweeting about how politicians have begun to use social campaigning strategies. 

A lot more goes into running a social media department, but if your social media employees are doing the above three things, then they are off to a good start. Building a social presence is a lot like building a business – you learn things along the way, and have to rise to meet the unique challenges that every company inevitably faces. There is no magic formula for deciding how, exactly, a social media department should be spending its time. But there are certain things that you should expect to be done, and knowing what to expect is the first step in determining the value of your social media department.

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Think You Have What It Takes to Be a Social Media Manager?

All the cool kids are social media managers nowadays. And after that brilliant post from Business Insider about avoiding handing out your social media to young ins  it’s becoming more important for both recent grads and hiring managers to better understand what a social media manager actually does.

No, it’s not playing on Facebook all day. (Okay, maybe a little.)

To be a social media manager, you need to be keyed in to two things:

1. Know your subject

If you post about running shoes and you’re not a runner, seriously consider becoming one. Talk to runners, visit the company’s factory, read books and blogs and talk to the engineer who created the shoes. This is so important because it means you can be current in your content and answer questions like you know what you’re talking about.

2. Know your voice (or rather, your brand’s voice)

We all have our own natural writing voice. I use a lot of exclamation points, short sentences, contractions and sarcasm, which might not be right for a custom-made running shoe company. So in talking to people passionate about these things and in reading other marketing material from the company, pay special attention to the words they use. Keep a notebook and jot those words down.Create a persona, and base your postings as if that person were talking, not you.

What your day will look like

Your day will be 75 percent emails. You need a direct connection to customer service, along with alerts set up for every single keyword, account and profile related to the company. Despite popular belief, fans can’t just complain on a Facebook page to get their project taken care of. While a social media manager might want to give them a refund or help solve their problems, most brands have escalation processes, and a manager will need to run it through the system first. Sometimes it goes through public relations and customer service before she can answer the customer’s question. (This doesn’t make it right, but it’s how it usually works.)

So as a social media manager, you’ll need to get in touch with these departments and constantly monitor/harass them for the right information. On top of that, PR and customer service departments usually have no idea what the appropriate answer might be for a social platform. They’ll give you something long and drawn out and skirt around the issue. Your job is to give a recommended response, then when said departments ignore you, convince them to see the light.

Here are a few skills that will also come in handy:

Know how to write — and write well

The daily life of a social media manager involves a lot of writing, a lot of Facebook advertising management and following your subject on blogs, Pinterest, YouTube and more. Then, of course, there’s the actual monitoring of the brand’s page. While I’d love the luxury of checking into my pages every hour on the hour, that’s often just not possible. Plus, it’s not the most productive use of your time.

Be willing to analyze (like, with numbers)

Then there’s the reporting time. Every week or month, you’ll need to analyze Facebook Insights data and report on which posts performed the best, which had the most shares and comments, which resulted in the most unlikes. Sometimes there’s going to be (gasp!) math involved. You’ve been warned.

Organize like a pro

Then there’s the inevitable project management. Most brand pages are always running campaigns you need to not only monitor, but create a strategy around. Brief the designers and the developers and constantly sense-check every little thing. Then go through the bug edits and fixes that always come up on Facebook. This constant page activity means you need to know what’s going live and when, what material you need from whom and have it all organized someplace awesome.

How many of you out there are already social managers? How does your day compare?

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8 Strong Social Media Advertising Tools for Your Company

Internet marketing should span a number of social media stations in order to capture as many possible leads as probable. But it can be difficult to stay on top of social media campaigns, specially if you have many platforms to maintain. With social media advertising and marketing software, you can keep track of all your social media business profiles and activity in one effortless place. regardless of whether you use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or perhaps a combination of some other social media sites to interact with clients, the subsequent social media promoting tools can assist you monitor each channel and combine them with your e mail campaigns, ecommerce software, and internet site.

Convert Social:

With quite a few tools at your disposal, such as a social media scheduling tool, Convert Social was established to make it less difficult to market your promoting communications by way of multiple social media stations. You can post your marketing and advertising subject material from RSS feeds and even schedule long term marketing and advertising campaigns. By monitoring all your channels in one place, you are more probably to spot relevant conversations and successfully engage with your viewers.

Dired Message Labs:

With Direct Message Labs, you can rapidly find the best social media platforms for your particular business, depending on your target audience and other vital components. In addition to helping you develop new profiles on the best suited social media sites the software program allows your advertising and marketing team to develop new posts and submit various media content across many platforms from one practical area.

HootSuite:

Taking care of several social media stations and tracking the overall performance of each one is made less difficult with the HootSuite dashboard. You can schedule social media messages, determine when and where your company is mentioned online, and measure the traffic of each social media site. As a item of analytics software, it could be very helpful for any marketing and advertising team, providing multiple report scenarios that can be shared with your colleagues or clients.

Kwanzoo:

The marketing campaigns from Kwanzoo can run on your web site, inside e mail notifications, on social media sites and affiliate web sites, and on paid advertising stations. By running researches and other interactive events mixed with users into customers. Customers can also share offers, helping to spread the word about your business. And because the software is completely cloud based, there’s no need to install any software on your computers. With analytics software included, you will also find out how well your strategies are running.

Loop Lingo:

This marketing and advertising tool is effective if you want to improve your social media following and appeal to more potential customers. By presenting special deals and discounts at the point of sale, it gives your clients a motivation to make prompt purchases and add your company to their social networks. You only pay Loop Lingo when it generates a sale, and with analytics software to track your marketing successes and failures, it’s worth taking into consideration.

Postling:

This useful social media device lets you schedule posts to various online social media platforms, keep track of conversations about your brand, and reply to comments, all from one useful location. It’s like a social media inbox for your small business. You may also receive notifications every time a keyword or keyphrase appears on selected social media sites (for illustration, the name of your business).

Sendible:

Much like other social media tracking platforms, Sendible also helps you monitor all your social media profiles in one location, making it much easier to interact with customers and keep track of brand performance. concurrently updating several media channels at once can be extremely helpful, particularly in case you lack the time or resources. Sendible can help you do this using its extremely versatile software, keeping you up to date with your target audience via social media, electronic mail, or SMS.

As social media marketing becomes even more widespread, harnessing the effectiveness of some of these advertising and marketing tools could help your business attract more competent leads and help maintain a loyal client base. Once you know how much you have to spend on social media marketing, why not consider using one or more of these tools to make your advertising activities more effective and cost-efficient?

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