The Importance of Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring is more than a new buzzword for a product some techie wants to sell you. It’s a vital reputation management tool that can help you boost your company’s reputation, take advantage of social media marketing opportunities and, frankly, save your business from embarrassment or worse.

What Is Social Media Monitoring?

Today, your online presence extends far beyond posting your catalog or menu online and optimizing it for search engines. Social media tools have given your customers the means and the ability to affect your business’ bottom line in ways that were impossible as little as five years ago. Your customers have blogs, they visit blogs, they comment on blogs. They post reviews about your company on social media sites like Yelp and on review sites like TravelInsider and tweet about their experiences with your business. Just as you used to have to keep your eye out for mentions of your business in the local newspaper, now you have to watch what they’re saying about you online. The problem is, online is a huge place. You could assign two full-time workers to do nothing but look for mentions of your company online and still miss some of the most important messages being posted.

Social media agencies such as Ianalyst.com offer a wide variety of services, including social media monitoring. The companies use specialized software to monitor various social media sites for mentions of your products, your company and your services. In a world where a video review of your product can go viral overnight, social media monitoring gives you early warning about possible controversies and bad publicity and allows you to capitalize on good publicity quickly.

Who Needs Social Media Monitoring?

If you think social media monitoring is only for the big guys, you could be in for a big – and too often unpleasant – surprise. All it takes is a single viral video to cause publicity damage your company may be dealing with for months. A social media marketing agency can monitor Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites for mentions of your business, give you a heads up about anything negative and help you device a plan to combat it.

Social media monitoring can have positive effects as well – it’s a great way to judge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, for example, and can give you an early heads up about ways your customers use your product or service so that you can promote them better. For more information about the benefits of social media monitoring, contact a social media marketing agency.

Employee Guidelines for Social Media Management

As the field of social media marketing grows, companies are finding that it’s a small world out there. Casual comments between employees – the kind that regularly pass at the water cooler or over drinks after work – can have lasting implications for your business when they’re disseminated over Twitter or recorded on Facebook.

While you may feel uncomfortable dictating what your employees do and say when they’re not on the clock, it’s important to include employee guidelines in your social media management plans. They should understand that when they are part of an online community that includes your company, they represent your business. The following guidelines can help ensure that all of your employees are on the same page when it comes to your social marketing.

Transparency

If your employees are discussing your product or your market niche in an online community, they should always disclose any professional or personal affiliations. Transparency is a vital part of maintaining your business integrity.

Privacy

The flip side of transparency is a respect for privacy. All of your employees must understand what constitute proprietary information and which information falls under any non-disclosure agreements. And of course, they should never post disparaging comments about clients or employees publicly, especially if it is information they’ve gained through a professional association.

Posting Guidelines

When posting to company blogs or as a company representative, need to be mindful of the company image. Their content should be informative, brief and always factual. If they quote someone or post something copyrighted, they should always attribute the original source. Finally, because their posts reflect on the company image, they should double-check all facts, and run a spelling and grammar check.

Professionalism

Finally, your visible employees should maintain a professional image online. When posting about controversial subjects, they should keep the tone of their comments respectful. Even better, they should avoid those subjects entirely.

While no small business owner relishes the idea of playing Big Brother over their employees’ social media lives, it’s important that they realize that their image is inextricably linked to the company’s image. Making sure that they understand the basics of your social media marketing and adhere to some common sense rules about online behavior should be a part of your social media management plan.

How to Target Baby Boomers with Your Social Media Management Plan

Businesses who aim their social media marketing at Gen Y could be making a serious mistake. According to the latest statistics, the Baby Boomers have nearly caught up with Gen Y in their use of social media tools like Twitter and Facebook. In fact, as of 2009, nearly two-thirds of all Baby Boomers were hooking up and linking in with social media sites like Youtube, Facebook, Classmates.com and LinkedIn. If you’re aiming your social media strategy at the younger generation, you’re shutting out one of the most profitable markets that’s ever existed.

If your social media management company isn’t developing a social media marketing strategy that includes those aged 43 to 63, it’s time for you to do some social networking of your own – preferably to find a social media consultant company that understands how to reach all of your customers. Until then, these tips can help you expand your marketing strategy to scoop up the older members of your market who are being ignored by many other businesses.

1. Make it easy for them.
Boomers aren’t technical Luddites – in fact, they may be among the most adaptable of all the generations in history. Just think of all the changes they’ve already made. That said, they really don’t want to jump through hoops to participate in your social media promotion. Bring them in with polls, or with contests such as Dunkin Donuts’ 2009 Design a Donut contest which invited customers to point-and-click their way through creating the company’s newest donut.

2. Hook it into their life experiences.
In other words, focus on what Boomers are already doing with their lives instead of going for the hip and cool factor. What are your ideal customers interested in doing? Do they travel? Enjoy photography? Love classic music? Design a social media campaign that focuses on those things to draw them in.

3. Don’t forget the women.
According to Facebook, women ages 50 to 60 are among the heaviest users of social networks. If you don’t have a Facebook presence, you could be missing out on hundreds of thousands of chances to put your product in front of the people who actually control the purse strings in the family.

A social media management company like iAnalyst.com can help you design a social marketing campaign that hits all of your target markets in just the right places.

Social Media Management – Making the Best Use of Twitter

It may be the most powerful not-quite-five-year-old on the block. Twitter, launched in July 2006, hit its stride early and has rapidly become one of the powerhouses of the social media world. Social media management gurus recognized the power of Twitter almost immediately – its bite-size messaging makes it perfect for disseminating quick information and bringing people together. If you’re trying to reach new customers or organizing for a cause, wrapping up your message into 140 character morsels can help you reach over 190 million users all over the world.

From the start, many in the media world dismissed Twitter as a fad – just one more symptom of the narcissism of the Web 2.0 generation. They completely missed the possibilities inherent in leveraging social leaders and tapping into a powerfully effective tool for getting a message heard. If you’re considering using Twitter as part of your social media strategy, study these tips on Twitter management from one of the web’s top social media management agencies, iAnalyst.

Build a Destination Website

One of the most valuable uses of Twitter is to bring targeted traffic to your sales pages and marketing campaign pages. Coordinate a Twitter campaign with your other social media presences – a Facebook fan page, a Tumblr page for short blog messages, your blog and your sales pages can all provide destinations.

Sharpen Your Message

Short and pithy messages are the most likely to be retweeted – and retweeting builds your visibility. In order to fit your message into 140-character bites, you need a clear, focused, on-point message. Whether you’re pushing a sales pitch or a social message, break it down so you can deliver it quickly and succinctly.

Use Hash Tags to Target Your Message

Twitter’s search functions continually improve, but the best way to make sure that your messages reach their intended target is to use hash tags. The # symbol denotes a keyword in your tweet. Many blogs and services monitor for keywords and retweet tweets that contain them, or publish a running feed of tweets containing specific hash tags. Look for industry specific hash tags, and start appending them to your tweets to get them picked up and rebroadcast.

Monitor Your Social Media Presence

Take advantage of software that monitors Twitter feeds for mentions of your company and tweets that use keywords you select so you can keep track of your presence on the social media landscape.

Offer Something of Value

When you contribute something valuable to the conversation, people will follow you and retweet your message. That means tweeting links to important articles and web pages of interest, not only your own website and promotions.

Get Help From a Professional

Let a professional manage your social media presence on the web. Social media management companies like iAnalyst are experts at monitoring your social media presence and designing social media marketing campaigns that deliver high value.

How to Leverage Your Investment in Blogs and Social Media

Back in the ‘80s, Faberge Organics was happy if you told two friends about their Wheat Germ Oil and Honey Shampoo, and they told two friends and so on and so on… The guys who created that ad would probably drop their teeth at the thought of reaching tens and dozens and hundreds of friends at a time with a short and sweet 140-character message. “Tell your friends” was the original social media network, and while the scope and range may have changed, the basics of reaching people through managed social media remains the same. If you’re using blogs, Twitter and other social media to reach your customers, clients or prospective contributors, there are a few best practices and rules of thumb that will help you spread your message wider and further than ever.

Condense Your Message

Before you can start broadcasting your message, you have to know what it is. Honing and condensing your message starts with defining your brand. Every blog post, every tweet and every message you send out should help define who you are in the minds of your prospective customers.

Define Your Aims

Know what you expect to achieve with your foray into social media. Your aims will define which applications you should use and the best ways to use them, alone and in combination with other types of media.

Integrate Social Media Applications

A total social media strategy should include more than one type of application. Blogs, microblogging, shared videos and other types of social media each have strengths and weaknesses. A professional social media consultant can help you weigh those and develop a strategy that matches your aims with the best set of applications to accomplish your advertising or consciousness-raising aims.

Leverage Interactive Social Media to Your Benefit

Offer something of value. It’s one of the oldest rules of social networking, and it applies exponentially in social media management and marketing. The content you offer is a vital part of establishing your identity and attracting people who are not just customers but fans.

Monitor Social Media

It’s not enough to disseminate content through your social media network. In order to stay out in front of the message, you also need to monitor what’s being said by others in your field or among your customers. Create alerts in Google and monitor tweets and blog posts that mention your company and your products so that you know what people are saying about you and can respond to input quickly and effectively.