You next meeting: Social Media

On a recent visit to LinkedIn, I noticed that some of the people I am connected to have an outdated profile. This got me thinking about social media and how to manage it, since a lot of soloprenuers, entrepreneurs and businesses use it as a form of advertising and to build brand awareness. Most medium to big businesses can and do hire a staff dedicated to social media posting. Most small business and solorprenuers/entrepreneurs do it themselves. So for the DIYers, how do you manage your social media and make sure to keep it current?

For starters, update your LinkedIn profile once a year or anytime you make a career or life change. Ditto for Face Book or any other social media that has a profile. I have connections on FB that still list their home as NYC when in fact they haven’t lived here in years. The New York chapter of your college alumni group wouldn’t hit you up for money, if they new you lived in Omaha and not NYC. Just saying!

The best and only way to keep track of your social media marketing is to log into your accounts every day and take their pulse. Why? I get more response to my posts on LinkedIn then my FB business page. Knowing this helps me to know where my posts should go and what kind of posts get the most response informs what I continue to post. The other thing this does is informs me as to who my audience is. I thought my audience would be stressed out and overworked parents, in stead it is business people who want to be more productive. “Knowing who your audience is and what they want to see on social is key to creating content that they will like, comment on, and share. It’s also critical for planning how to develop your social media fans into customers for your business.” (Blog.Hootsuite.com)

Now that you know what to post, where and who your audience is, you need to evaluate whether your social media marketing is working. How? Analytics. Every site has them; so look at them regularly. “Analyze Data to Find the Perfect Quantity…and almost as important, quantity. Because let’s face it, social media is about what is going on NOW, right this second. This is especially true for Twitter; we recently found that engagement rate increased 46% week over week after publishing 30 more tweets than the week prior. In fact, those 30 extra tweets helped push 30% more traffic to the website with 60% more link clicks than the previous week.” (Wordstream.com)

Ok, so you know you need quality, and quantity, but did you know you need goals? That’s right—what are your social media marketing goals? To increase traffic to your site, to get more click-throughs or sell more tickets to your seminar. Before you can manage your social media, decide what your goal(s) is. My goals are to build brand awareness and build my mailing list for this monthly newsletter. “The first step to creating a social media marketing strategy is to establish your objectives and goals. Without goals, you have no way to measure your success or your social media return on investment (ROI).” (Blog.Hootsuite.com)

To manage your social media, use a scheduling software like Hootsuite, Buffer, etc. to manage all your social media streams in one place. In the software, you can post to more than one stream at once and even schedule posts into the future. I spend an hour on Monday every week making my posts and scheduling them out over the next month. By doing this, I am making sure that I have posts year round. To get material for my posts and to link back to the material, I have set up Google alerts on key words and phrases in my industry such as “productivity” and “time management.”

An hour may not be enough for you. Be sure in your weekly schedule to have time for posting, analyzing and your daily pulse check. So in a nutshell, you manage social media by having a goal for it, checking in daily, posting regularly, looking at the analytics and tailoring your campaigns to align with all of this.

This article was originally published in my May 2018 Newsletter. To receive my newsletter, click the subscribe button on my website.