Tag Archives: Redemption

10 Best Practices for Social Media Management

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Engaging in social networks begins with determining who to reach and how engagement satisfies their needs in order to make the most out of Social Marketing Best Practices. The audience in any social network is made up of culturally and philosophically different individuals and groups. In order to know what segment of a social stream may have some interest in your brand, best practices need to be formed around purpose, mission and matching values.

Purpose and usefulness are features which support the benefits expressed in brand messages. At the same time capacity to maintain relevance without diluting the message helps to sustain engagement and reduce unfollows and unlikes. So let’s take a look at some best practices for marketing in social streams.

1. Designs for effective channel strategies are based on follow worthy or likable personalities. Some qualities for building charisma include sincerity, humor and diplomacy.

2. Developing an organized framework to support each channel individually should include establishing an engagement rhythm that meets the needs of an audience.

3. Set a mission and purpose for each account which includes learning more about the audience you’re trying to reach. The conversation will give you clues about how to adapt your messages to connect your brand to what is useful to them.

4. Create content that is engaging, contextually relevant, and shareable. Polls, promotions, and questions can be used to expand basic editorial content for more social interactivity.

5. Construct a listening process to monitor brands as well as conversations related to each account because good listening skills makes better conversation easy.

6. Conversation is best supported with an information path and workflow to ensure company representatives can engage or respond in a congruent and appropriate way.

7. A social media brand guide will help to define the brand persona, characteristics, voice, and essence to be consistent with brand presentation and use in other media.

8. Customer service functions to solve problems and answer questions. It also builds prospect trust. In social streams a dedicated channel to satisfy customer needs is a best practice to promote appreciation and loyalty.

9. Timing is everything and clarity is essential. Optimized language and timing is a best practice to improve reach and engagement.

10. Performance metrics are essential to improve engagement and editorial strategy. Measures of social performance significantly differ from financial indicators. On the other hand, social performance does affect bottom line so distinct metrics need to be defined as relevant to how social media contributes to business accounting.

Basic Twitter Marketing Guide

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It is hard to find anyone who haven’t heard, used or seen of Twitter these days. It’s popularity has increased even more within the business world. It is open source of information for anyone and everyone to use. But still some of us are not sure of how to make the most out of it. When I first started using Twitter for my work, I was bit lost, even though I had idea about what Twitter was and how it worked. I put together this basic guidelines for anyone interested in using Twitter or already have account and want to make more out of it.

First step is to get a account. You can go to Twitter and create account. Once you have account setup it is important to customize your profile to something familiar with logos, picture or products etc. Click on Profile next to home on top. Then click on edit your profile. Or click on setting where your picture and account name is displayed. Then you will be presented with options to customize your profile. Click on profile and make sure, if it is for company you have company logo and if it is personal Twitter have your picture. Icons are outdated and nobody likes to follow icons. Use the space for Bio wisely with strong and specific message regarding your business or you.

You can always use your own background image to make it more attractive and familiar.
To change the background image.
1. Click on Design.
2. Then Change Background Image, browse the picture you want displayed and Save Change.

And of course the most important, your tweets. Make sure they are engaging, relevant and interesting to your followers. Hashtag and trending topic are also good strategies to tie your tweets to send your message beyond your followers. Hashtags and trending topics are displayed on right hand side of your Twitter account. Twitter is not only about informing your customer but also about communicating with them answering their query, solving their problem, listening to them and taking actions, keeping close eyes on your competition, following the trends on your industry.

First and most important is always research your competition. You will know about what your competition is doing and may also be able to find a niche where they are falling behind. With Twitter it is open and easy. You can locate their Twitter account through directories like wefollow. You can include your own Twitter account with 5 interest categories. Lets you find the top Twitter accounts with categories. Very effective in finding the influencers in particular industry.

Once you have followed your competitor or subject of interest create a list. This helps you to be informed on what your competitors/subject are doing and how they are handling their Twitter strategies, special offer or other promotion or their weak points. For easier access to the information you can create a lists for each competition/subject so that you don’t have to search for their tweets in jungle of tweets. Here is how to do it. Find and follow them in the Twitter. Then you will get option of create a list. Follow the instruction and you will have the list with all the tweets for that Twitter account.

Once the account is set up following is the next step to get followers to your account. The key to following is look at the number of people they are following and number of follower they have. 1:1 ratio means if you are following that person it is most likely they will follow you back. Finding people is easy, just click on who to follow and type in your interest/company or keywords you want to follow in the search box. Check the follower to follow ratio.

If someone follows you and they are relevant to your business or interest make sure you follow them back and send a direct message. Make the direct message short, relevant and personal.

Hootsuite is important tool that helps you monitor you Twitter. The great thing about this tool is its free and after signing up you will be able to monitor your Twitter performance in one platform. You can monitor mentions, direct messages, searches and Twitter lists by setting upto 10 columns at a time. With the search you can use the keyword related to your industry to see the real time tweet queries and direct them to website/blogs or answer their queries with @username.

Most important aspect for any media or marketing effort is flawless integrating with other marketing effort and continuous and engaging communication. Integrate your social media into other aspects like website, blog, email signature, advertisement etc to get the best results and maximum exposure. There’s ton of tools, both free and paid versions, that help monitor Twitter analytic for your business and it’s worth trying few of them to figure out what works best for your scenario and goals.