Three Things You Should Know When Hiring a Social Media Manager
Social media offers an entirely new playing field for businesses, where there are an essentially unlimited number of opportunities.
You're already interested in getting into social media so you know some of the benefits, but what you may not know is the best way to take advantage of the new opportunities to grow your business.
What social media provides you with is the opportunity to build an overall marketing and communication strategy that will help you build customer loyalty, streamline your customer service and, most importantly, make more money.
An expert in social media will help you develop your strategy, create a distinct brand and nurture the customer relationships that crucial to long term success.
There are three things you are going to want to focus on: Create your strategy.
You need to know your long term and short term goals.
Do you want to focus on capturing leads, or are you more interested in building your reputation and your brand? What you need to do, and what a social media expert can help you with, is find out exactly what is important to your business and tell you exactly what you need to do to pursue those goals.
This is also the time when you'll want to decide on how you're going to manage your online presence.
Are you going to respond to emails, tweets and posts on your own, or are you going to hire someone to handle them for you? Execute Your Strategy.
After you've decided what your approach to social media is going to be and what platforms you're going to use, the next step is actually creating your social media identities and accounts.
This includes, but is by no means limited to, signing up for Twitter and building a following, creating a Facebook page and/or company page on LinkedIn, and starting a blog.
Once you have them started up, you'll want to get them linked together for maximum ease of use.
You can, for instance, use your Twitter feed to update your Facebook status, and then sign up for Twitter feed and link your blog to it.
Basically, you want to join the key networks and distribute your content and make connections.
The subtle but critical strategy here is creating the right content for each venue because they all have a different audience and intention.
Build your customer relationships and your brand.
Once you've established yourself online, when you've joined networks and have made some connections, it's time to put your strategy to work for you.
The key is to be active on all these platforms; you can't treat them like static web pages and just let them sit.
You need to keep engaging them on a regular basis.
This definitely includes things like posting blogs, tweets and other comments regularly, but it also requires that you listen.
You need to listen to people talking about your company, people talking about your market.
You want people talking about you, telling all their friends about you.
This is the best advertising you can get, and you must foster these discussions.
If someone does talk about you, talk to them.
Reward that behavior and you'll be enhancing your reputation.
Believe it or not, studies have shown that if customers have an issue and you are quick to respond, this will make them even more loyal than people who never had an issue to begin with.
Communication is crucial, and it's what social media is all about.
With all that in mind, it's time to getting going.
You don't have to do it yourself either, and you shouldn't.
There are experts who can make the process close to effortless in social media marketing.
You're already interested in getting into social media so you know some of the benefits, but what you may not know is the best way to take advantage of the new opportunities to grow your business.
What social media provides you with is the opportunity to build an overall marketing and communication strategy that will help you build customer loyalty, streamline your customer service and, most importantly, make more money.
An expert in social media will help you develop your strategy, create a distinct brand and nurture the customer relationships that crucial to long term success.
There are three things you are going to want to focus on: Create your strategy.
You need to know your long term and short term goals.
Do you want to focus on capturing leads, or are you more interested in building your reputation and your brand? What you need to do, and what a social media expert can help you with, is find out exactly what is important to your business and tell you exactly what you need to do to pursue those goals.
This is also the time when you'll want to decide on how you're going to manage your online presence.
Are you going to respond to emails, tweets and posts on your own, or are you going to hire someone to handle them for you? Execute Your Strategy.
After you've decided what your approach to social media is going to be and what platforms you're going to use, the next step is actually creating your social media identities and accounts.
This includes, but is by no means limited to, signing up for Twitter and building a following, creating a Facebook page and/or company page on LinkedIn, and starting a blog.
Once you have them started up, you'll want to get them linked together for maximum ease of use.
You can, for instance, use your Twitter feed to update your Facebook status, and then sign up for Twitter feed and link your blog to it.
Basically, you want to join the key networks and distribute your content and make connections.
The subtle but critical strategy here is creating the right content for each venue because they all have a different audience and intention.
Build your customer relationships and your brand.
Once you've established yourself online, when you've joined networks and have made some connections, it's time to put your strategy to work for you.
The key is to be active on all these platforms; you can't treat them like static web pages and just let them sit.
You need to keep engaging them on a regular basis.
This definitely includes things like posting blogs, tweets and other comments regularly, but it also requires that you listen.
You need to listen to people talking about your company, people talking about your market.
You want people talking about you, telling all their friends about you.
This is the best advertising you can get, and you must foster these discussions.
If someone does talk about you, talk to them.
Reward that behavior and you'll be enhancing your reputation.
Believe it or not, studies have shown that if customers have an issue and you are quick to respond, this will make them even more loyal than people who never had an issue to begin with.
Communication is crucial, and it's what social media is all about.
With all that in mind, it's time to getting going.
You don't have to do it yourself either, and you shouldn't.
There are experts who can make the process close to effortless in social media marketing.
