That is one good-looking and functional Twitter post.

The Social Media Manager

I’ve spoken previously about social management and how there is no real benchmark for outlining what process must be followed in
order for someone to be deemed a ‘great’ social media manager. As we investigate these challenges, I would like you to keep in mind that YOUR opinion matters here.

• The Sliding Scale: A core challenge for social media managers is the proliferation and idealization of the notion of ‘good enough.’ Managers think that if it ‘kind of works,’ then it works, and that’s a win for the strategy. This is NOT true at all. In fact, social media requires above and beyond attention to detail, on scales we have yet to measure. All we know is that the brands that do the best, don’t do the most – they literally do ‘the best.’ Average work can’t be acceptable in social management.

EXAMPLE: Posting any old image along with a Facebook post vs. posting a specially designed infographic that complements your Facebook update. The interactions and shares you’ll get from the ‘created from scratch’ image will be much, much higher.

• Content Integrity: Another issue with social managers today is that they tend to ‘copy’ the tones, styles and formatting that everyone else uses. Unfortunately most people using social media do it for personal, and not sales-based reasons. To guarantee the integrity of your content, and to make sure that it stays in line with your overall social media goals – you need to formulate your own ‘in-house’ set of content parameters: style, tone, format, spacing, rules, toolkits and the like.

Check out how we space our Facebook posts, to get additional interactions!

EXAMPLE: Using unique spacing on both Facebook and Twitter, to gain more fans and follower. This may be a sub-strategy, but it’s one that matters as your content assets grow over time.

• Content Asset Management: All content that is created is an asset. If you’re a financial manager, you manage your assets carefully as they are pretty much the most important parts of your daily business. It’s the same with content, and I’ll tell you why. Content has the ability to become very profitable, very quickly, for no particular reason at all. When this happens, you better hope you have a content asset management strategy in place. Then you can leverage this boost and convert it into sales.

EXAMPLE: A blog post that you posted 3 years ago suddenly ranks on Google page 1. You receive a ton of traffic and interactions because of this out-dated post. Bad practice would be to ignore it and continue posting new stuff. Good practice would be to investigate WHY the content has suddenly escalated (like stock does), and capitalize on it. That means finding out why the search term is suddenly more valuable, or why the topic is being explored again in your niche. Then you should create new content on that topic, with that keyword to maximize the traffic flow and gain additional sales from the ‘asset conversion.’

This is just the beginning of a whole list of problems that social media managers have been encountering. Now I’m going to invite you to leave your core problems here. I will do my best to help you solve them over the coming weeks.

Don’t be afraid to detail the problems you’ve been having below! I love to help.

Or…join our Facebook page and get instant updates as they happen.

Courtesy of cahootsblog.com

The Social Media Manager’s Job

Every brand should have a document (or contract) that details what is expected of their social media manager on a temporal basis. Because there are few benchmark brands that have done this, companies are hiring social media managers that get away with doing practically ‘nothing’ but ‘messing’ around with social media.

• Social media is about STRATEGY
• Social media is about CONTENT creation and management
• Social media is about ROI

When you take these three things into account, you’ll realize that perhaps your social media manager isn’t doing enough to justify their salary. Social managers need to use the right tools and they need to know when to use these tools to aim for their predefined goals.

• Social media managers should set weekly, monthly and bi-annual goals
• They should be concerned with community growth and REACH
• The blog and email list should be a central concern

What Brands Should Expect To Receive

I’ve heard a lot of terrible stories about a young, dynamic media professional entering the field of social media management for a brand, only to be fired 3 months later. What went wrong? A lot!

• Untrained social media managers don’t know about paper trails and reporting

As a social media manager it’s your job to PROVE to your employer that your social strategies are working in the short and long term. That means that you need to document EVERYTHING that you do, to cover your actions.

• If you order content, you need a good reason to do so
• If you need an ad budget, you need a good reason
• If you need to increase your Facebook fan base, you need justify a budget for it

Courtesy of socialmediaexaminer.com

Just like an advertising manager, it will be your job to show your brand manager reports on your progress. If you can sufficiently prove (via previous tests) that one element of social advertising, content publication or marketing works, you will get your budget.

But if you approach your brand with a few more Facebook and Twitter fans, and zero tests and reports, don’t expect a happy ending. Social media is about the numbers – just think of yourself as an accountant for people instead of money.

• Ongoing reports need to be kept for each platform
• Ongoing reports need to be kept for each content strategy
• There needs to be one overall weekly report
• The month will consist of 4 weekly reports and the months highlights
• Graphs, charts and stats need to be created every six months
• Six month progress reports are based on 24 weekly reports

When the social media manager needs to inflate the content or ad budget for a product launch, or an event – the numbers will show them exactly where to invest for best results. This is how you improve, learn and grow your employees brand over time.

What part of social media management do you find the most challenging?

Courtesy of hyype.com

The 5 Principles of Social Media Management

As a social media manager you need to be uniquely aware of the online marketplace, and the social dynamics that occur on each social media network. In order to begin your journey as a manager that knows what they are doing – you need to hold these principles in high esteem. Only then will you be able to properly define your job, and your goals.

#1: Social Media Management is About Consistency

Principle number one states that consistency is key. As a social media manager you will have to learn to become a time management Jedi, as your accounts will achieve nothing without consistent content and quality. Daily posting is just a part of this overall plan. You need to create strategies that guarantee all your social properties are fed with content.

#2: Social Media Management is About Influence

Principle number two states that you must have an influencer strategy that runs alongside your other social media strategies. Experts know that small business pages won’t get anywhere without decent exposure and the only way to secure that is to make friends with top influencers. Social media managers need to focus on this more often.

#3: Social Media Management is About Practical Measurement

Principle number three states that social media success is dependent on your ability to practically test, measure, read and draw conclusions from analytics data. It’s a cycle of identifying an area that needs improvement, working on it – and then testing to see whether the results turned out in your favor. Constant improvement is key for social media managers.

#4: Social Media Management is About Exposure

Principle number four states that social media is about exposure, and the many ways you can get it. One area to work on is your appearance in mainstream media. Using press releases and online reporting sites like helpareporter.com, you can build authority – and even land television, radio or blog appearances that will help grow your communities.

#5: Social Media Management is About Engagement

Principle number five involves the one element that no good social strategy can be without – engagement. If your fans aren’t communicating with you, then you’ve failed as a social media manager. All of your strategies and content need to be geared towards prompting action or causing crowd sourced content from your fans.

The Basic Skills Every Social Media Manager Needs

If those 5 principles didn’t orientate you, then this surely will. All social media manager need to have a specific set of skills to do their job properly. First and foremost, social media managers are MEDIA specialists. They know how different types of content can be used to illicit emotional and physical responses from people.

• Ability to use Photoshop or other image editing programs
• Ability to use Lightwave or video editing software
• Ability to use apps like Vine, Instagram and TweetDeck
• Ability to optimize content for the search engines
• Ability to write engaging, grammatically correct copy
• A business understanding of social media platforms
• Ability to cleanly and easily market and sell in a social environment
• Ability to schedule, manage and navigate daily deadlines

Courtesy of mmarley.com

Each of these skills are very important to a social media manager. Without a few of these, you won’t be able to create your own media, or run your own social campaigns. If you don’t know how to work with images, or video for example – you’re excluding an essential part of an overall social media strategy that can be highly effective.

Great social media managers are intelligent, curious, conversational, fast, a natural goal-setter and a results-orientated media specialist.

The Social Media Management Routine

Social media managers should work to a set routine, to maximize their time. At least half an hour of their day should be dedicated to news in their niche. When a manager knows what the absolute latest news is, they can capitalize on it for all of their social media outlets. It’s important that a large portion of their daily content is to-the-minute fresh.

This is because many social platforms and Google rank content by ‘relevancy’ which means that it needs to be tied to a current event.

• Beginning of the month content strategy and scheduling
• The 80/20 rule – 80% valuable content, 20% direct marketing content
• Creating content for 3 hours a day
• Posting or publishing content for 2 hours a day
• Monitoring analytics for an hour a day
• Taking notes and staying informed for 1 hour a day
• Reaching out to influencers for an hour a day

Social media managers can also decide to have content made for them, or to dedicate more than 3 hours per day to content creation. The social media machine is always hungry, and it always needs to be fed.

Social Media Content Rules

For the efficient social media manager, the content is what matters most. All content needs to be organized in specific ways so that it is easier to manage. Let’s take a closer look at how content should be used, sourced or published.

Courtesy of shastapeakmarketing.com

• Holiday or occasion based content
• Relevant, time sensitive content
• RARE niche specific content
• Content sourced from influencers, experts and fans
• Content that is cured from the internet
• Content that is meant to sell, promote or market

All content must have a purpose, which means that it’s best to decide which platform you’re making the content for, before you actually create it. That way it will work a lot better.

• Social media dashboard

As a social media manager you’ll be working with several different types of content, within several different types of platforms in an ever changing online arena. You will need some help to manage this content, and that help comes in the form of a good social media dashboard like Hootsuite, TweetDeck or Argyle Social.

Social media managers use these dashboards to schedule their automatic content, and to organize what sort of content needs to come next. There is always content you can create that is very general, and this makes for good foundational content for your platforms.

There are certain rules that you must abide by if your content is going to do well, in a sea of millions of other pieces of content.

• Your images must always be beautiful, inspiring, educational or profound
• Your videos must always be stylized (fans must be able to see they belong to you)
• Your text must always be the absolute best you can make it

There is a reason why social media managers need to create content that is way better than their competitors. If they don’t, they won’t accelerate the pace of their strategies. Everything slows down when content is average, or poor. Social media is about speed and quality – the publishers with the best content, published the quickest – get the traffic, fans and sales.

The Social Media Manager and Connections

There is a principle that is used in social media, known loosely as the ‘association’ principle – whereby authority, credibility and fame is gained according to who is in your network, and who you are visibility close to online. A no-name blogger that gets guest posts from other no-name bloggers doesn’t mean anything to people.

But a no-name blogger that gets guest posts, videos, audio and images from top names in their niche is clearly someone to follow. They are ‘up and coming’ stars. That’s why, the savvy social media manager knows that to make the RIGHT friends online can skyrocket any strategies from the beginning. It should be your first priority when you begin.

Connect with bloggers, authors, experts and speakers that can help you launch your business properly. This is one strategy you won’t find anywhere online. It’s tough to approach and impress people that don’t know you. But there are ways!

• Create an influencer strategy
• List 20 people you simply must have in your networks
• Follow all of their social media pages
• Comment, share, like, on all of their social media for 4 weeks
• Engage them in conversation several times
• Be an advocate for their business, before approaching them
• Once they know who you are, send an introductory email
• Get blogs, tweets, events, videos and audio from them!

Your Social Media Manager Scoreboard

As old as Excel is to many people, it’s still the only efficient way you can really keep track of all your social media strategies and practices online. Use an Excel spread sheet to detail which platforms you’re on, what you’re doing there, when and how. Take notes all the time and record your results.

You’ll notice patterns forming over time, and you’ll be able to make your own adjustments to improve your overall campaign. The ‘overall’ improvement is tough, as social media dashboards only offer limited help. That’s why every social media manager, in my opinion, should know how to use Excel. It’s one scoreboard you don’t want to ignore.

Common Social Media Management Mistakes

All social media managers are basically self-taught, unless you did a few of our excellent courses that we offer here at SMMU. But on the whole, the industry is littered with mistakes, based on practices that don’t work. Here are a few to avoid.

• Marketing and advertising practices are short term. This is wrong! Marketing content is a long term strategy, while advertising is more of an instant technique.

• Social media is about online exposure and engagement first. Wrong! Social media is first and foremost about selling in a non-intrusive manner. One example may be to build communities around you brand…for long term selling.

• People hate all forms of selling on social media. Wrong! People don’t like direct sales, but there are many other ways to sell – by being a quality brand, by engaging your customers, by offering discounts, deals and value to your consumers.

• Winging it will work. Wrong! You can wing it on social media, but don’t expect any serious results. Only really lazy, really bad social media manager’s wing-it, with no strategy at all. This is considered poor practice in the industry.

Courtesy of maestrosocialmedia.com

The Route To Social Management Success

The only way to really excel as a social media manager for your own business, is to make sure that your basic infrastructure is in place. You must have access to content on a daily basis. You must be posting several times a day. You must build the main assets of your business online – these are:

• Your website or blog email list is an asset
• Your fan count on any social platform is an asset
• Your level of engagement on any social platform is an asset
• The viral potential of your content is an asset

A modern social media manager can achieve success with very little financial input, if they are willing to trade their time for results. Don’t expect to follow the ‘15 mins’ a day recipe and suddenly expect to have a lot of sales from your online profile. Sales – which are your ultimate goal – only come from strategy, analysis and expertise in content.

As a social media manager you are a seller above all else. A social seller that is able to access many people, many opinions and many wallets on your own social media properties.

What part of managing your social media do you find the most difficult? Drop me a line and I’ll see if I can help.

Courtesy of moddb.com

What is The Social Media Management Force?

The ability to manage multiple social media accounts at the same time, with the goal of gaining more exposure, traffic and income from your efforts. This sounds simple, but to a young Padawan social manager it can be nearly impossible.

Darth Vader says: “To master social diversity and multiplicity is simple. Don’t expect to do it on your own, and without the right tools.”

Building Your Social Media Light Saber

No-one can be expected to become a social media management expert without the right tools. For a Jedi, the light saber is the most important tool. Your light saber will be your social media marketing platform or dashboard that you use to manage your accounts.

Courtesy of prdaily.com

Choose from our top 5 pick of social media management tools:

1. Hootsuite
2. Vertical Response
3. Argyle Social
4. Sendible
5. Sprout Social

Once you have your social media sites loaded onto your dashboard, managing them will be less time consuming, and in this game, time is everything.

Darth Vader says: “Find a social dashboard you are comfortable with using. Don’t just choose the first one you find. Test different options to find the best weapon.”

Social Media Management Like a Jedi

A Jedi is a master of several things, namely: time, patience, defense, attack and mind control. If you can perfect these, you can become a powerful social media manager.

1. Time: Learn to divide your time among your social media sites according to their hierarchy of importance. They must align with your overall goals.

2. Patience: Social media management is about patience, and repetition. Keep working and engaging daily, and eventually you WILL be successful and fully trained.

3. Defense: Make sure that you know what the internet is saying about you, using your social media management tools. Then you can defend against online attacks.

4. Attack: Sometimes you need to launch a product or service into the market. This is when you’ll use your social media marketing tools to launch an attack on your niche. Hopefully, if your infrastructure is strong, you’ll win the battle.

5. Mind control: Not real mind control! I’m talking about getting folks to like you, whether they want to or not, using content. Social media management is about using content to bridge the gap between business and consumer.

Darth Vader says: “Learn these traits of a successful social media manager and practice them often. Soon you will become the person you are trying to be.”

Courtesy of blog.thoughtpick.com

The Consistency of Social Media Management

To be a Jedi you have to pay your dues. That means training for years, and then training for even longer in the field. It’s the same with becoming a powerful social media manager. You can only learn so much through theory, inevitably you will have to test things for yourself.

Keep working and trying new things. Come up with new strategies and test them using your light saber! Social media management doesn’t have to be an uphill battle if you are consistent with your methods and tests.

Work on your social media daily for best results and become a master social media management Jedi!

How do you manage your social media portfolio? Any new tricks for us in 2013?

If not, join us on Facebook here!

Courtesy of mybloggertricks.com

Social Websites That Help To Boost Your SEO

• Social media sites that are content heavy are great for SEO
• Social sites that are image heavy and highly viral are great for inspiring traffic
• Social media marketing platforms with fast interaction are great for SEO

Let’s take a look at these 5 hidden social media sites that will help you drive enormous traffic numbers to your websites.

#1: The Power of Pinterest

Pinterest, the break-out social media success of 2012 is THE social marketing platform for creating and driving traffic now. Pinterest beats Twitter, StumbleUpon, Google, Bing and Yahoo in referral traffic stats. It’s the fourth largest platform for traffic referrals in the world.

How To Use Pinterest?

If traffic is your goal, make social media sites like Pinterest a priority. Include it as one of your top 3, along with Facebook and Twitter. It really has incredible viral potential, and has the ability to drive thousands of people to your websites merely using images and comments as an attraction model. It’s affordable, simple and you’ll see results immediately.

Courtesy of marketingpilgrim.com

#2: The Fury of Facebook

It’s true – Facebook produces 75% of all referral traffic on social media sites. The reason why it’s here at number 2, is that Pinterest users are a lot more likely to buy, share and interact once they get to your websites – making them more valuable than Facebook users.

How To Use Facebook?

Social media sites like Facebook need to be your top priority for driving traffic to your websites. Use social media management to effectively diversify your update strategy, and create lots of engaging content there. Videos, media, podcasts, slideshows, text and images – Facebook wants it all.

#3: The Rise of LinkedIn

LinkedIn has just undergone a makeover, and has recently seen a 1000% jump in referral traffic to Facebook. Twitter decided to part ways with the business social media marketing giant, which had an impact on both sites. The main impact being that people were now moving from LinkedIn to Facebook, to your websites.

How To Use LinkedIn?

Social media sites like LinkedIn should be used for business purposes, but they need to be optimized as well. All of your group or business posts need to be SEO’d, not to mention your profile. If you can create a nice LinkedIn traffic boost, your Facebook referral traffic will automatically increase, as will your website traffic.

Courtesy of entrepreneur.com

#4: The Booming Blog

Social websites like your blog have the power to generate tons of excellent traffic, simply by focusing on a comprehensive SEO strategy. When you rise in the ranks, people will visit your blog more often, and your social sites will funnel extra visitors there as well. Your blog can then do what your website can’t – gain clients as fans.

How To Use Your Blog?

The only way to use social media sites properly in this instance, is to have a daily content strategy. Your optimized blog posts and accompanying social media updates should send your blog running up the ranking ladder. After 3 months you should be on page 1. But you must post on these social media pages each day.

#5: Growling Google+ or Terrific Twitter?

You’ve probably heard a lot about social media sites like Google+ being great as an SEO tool to boost your traffic ratios – right? Well, here’s some news for you – don’t bother. People have reported a steady decline in referral traffic from Google+ since its inception. You are better off using Twitter as a social site to generate traffic. Why? Because sharing there is fast and Google likes that.

How To Use Twitter?

I would recommend at least 4-8 tweets per day that have been pre-written and optimized with keywords and appropriate hashtags. These don’t include the ‘response’ tweets you should be sending to inspire conversation in your network.

These social media sites will get you that extra traffic you need each day. All you have to do is maintain a solid, performance –based social strategy and the traffic will happen. What are you waiting for? Go and work on your social SEO immediately!

Sign up for our new webinar on LinkedIn here!

Otherwise, how do you increase traffic to your websites using social media?

Courtesy of onesocialmedia.com

The 5 Pro Social Media Marketing Introduction

• Jeremiah Owyang – Altimeter Group and all round social media marketing expert
• Chris Brogan – Social media management champion and expert blogger
• Mari Smith – Facebook guru and social media fundi
• Michael Stelzner – Socialmediaexaminer.com founder and author of Launch
• Jason Falls – Socialmediaexplorer.com founder and author of No BS Social Media

Hour a Day Social Marketing Pros Advice

Jeremiah Owyang Says:

Courtesy of ontherecordpodcast.com

Tip: Advertising should be part of your social media marketing strategy daily. It’s becoming more important, and can generate the most leads for your company. Look at creating innovative, interactive and creative ads that force people to interact with you on social media sites.

Chris Brogan Says:

Courtesy of chrisbrogan.com

Tip: Chris blogs at least once a week. He tweets or posts social updates at least 4X per day. He focuses on a private free newsletter to build a quality list for use in future marketing efforts. He provides audio podcasts to diversify his social media marketing delivery. Finally, he writes helpful books that people can read on planes. Follow his example!

Mari Smith Says:

Courtesy of Twitter.com

Tip: Mari is all about relationship marketing, she teaches her fans to spend more time ‘interacting’ than posting. An interaction is a direct prompt from someone to engage in conversation or an action. These must be part of your hour a day strategy!

Michael Stelzner Says:

Courtesy of socialmediaexaminer.com

Tip: Social media marketing done right, takes a team. Not everyone can afford a team, but everyone can afford to outsource. If your business isn’t outsourcing some of your social media efforts, then you’ll be left behind. Cut down your hour a day, into 20 minutes a day, by outsourcing parts of your content.

Jason Falls Says:

Courtesy of epodcastnetwork.com

Tip: The more you engage, the higher your rankings will be. Jason knows that social media marketing is about interaction. Without it, there is no point. Person-to-person interaction is all that matters. Make sure that yours counts for SEO, and that you use keywords!

Social Media Marketing Tips In Review:

• Use some of your hour a day to advertise in creative ways
• Break your strategy down into steps that can be managed daily
• Focus on a single platform and on connecting with people there
• Use outsourcing if you struggle to get your campaigns off the ground
• Engage, engage, engage! For better SEO and busier pages.

Use these 5 pro tips to assist you in your hour-a-day social media marketing strategies. In no time you’ll get all the exposure, rankings and sales that you need to grow and succeed!

Loved the post? Why not join our Facebook community here?

How much social media work can you fit into 1 hour a day?

Courtesy of viralblog.com

Creating Clear Objectives For Each Strategy

Each brand should have its own unique social strategy. That means you can’t use template strategies across your brand profiles. Each brand should have its own set of clear social objectives, according to what would enhance your profile content. It can be tempting to use each brand to promote the other – don’t do that!

Unless the brands are related, do not fill your profiles with random unrelated content from your other brand profiles. This is the fastest way to scare away valuable fans and potential customers. Focus on details, and customize each brand’s social presence.

Use Professional Managers or Writers

Professional social media managers or writers understand brand differences, and will play to each brand’s inherent content strength. But if you give say, 3 brands, to an internal junior at your company, they’ll quickly cause a world of trouble. Suddenly, you’ll get duplicate content, duplicate tactics and unfocused marketing strategies that intermingle with each other.

When you use an untrained staff member – one brand is more than enough for them to handle. Either assign each brand to other individuals, or hire a professional company that knows how to keep your brand message and presence intact.

Use Social Media Management Platforms

Social media management tools like Argyle Social, always come in handy for multi-brand projects. On platforms like these, you’ll be able to publish directly to your various social media sites from inside your management tool. You can segment each project and assign duties and project goals.

Best of all – you’ll have all of your analytics in one place. You can switch between brand social strategies with ease, and still keep track of your split testing, monitoring and adjustment procedures. This as you know, is incredibly important to social media success.

Prioritize and Assign a Hierarchy

If you are going to handle this on your own, or internally, then design and prioritize your strategies. In other words find out which brand needs more attention, and put them on the top of your strategy list. The larger brands will be fine with some basic social media work. Also take product launches and events into account.

If one of your brands is launching a new product, then you’ll have to focus on that social media strategy, more than the others. Unless you have a team of people working on each brand, don’t try and divide your time equally among your social strategies.

Using these tips, you’ll be able to manage multiple brand social media strategies more efficiently. Check your analytics often, and see which strategy needs an additional boost at the beginning of each month!

Do you think one person could manage a multi-brand social strategy? Tell me about your experiences with social media and your brands!

Courtesy of ctv.ca

But now, Kutcher is feeling the keen sting of a tweet gone wrong.

Even Celebs Need Management Teams

After the firing of Joe Paterno, Kutcher published a tweet in his defense – without investigating why the man was fired in the first place. As it turns out, Paterno was accused of covering up an incident of child rape, not something you want to be aligned with. The outpouring was tremendous and violent. Followers protested by sending Kutcher thousands of hate tweets.

Eventually, Kutcher recanted, apologized and came to a sudden realization. He is not qualified to speak to 8 million people. With such a large, powerful following behind him, his tweets affect people. That’s why he has decided to filter all of his social media posts through a social media management company. It’s the only way he can prevent this from happening again.

Social Media Management: Crucial To Brands

News like this reminds us that brand management in social media is a necessary part of online exposure. Both small and large business, personal and private accounts need to be monitored, filtered and prepared for online readership. It’s not only about getting more followers, earning money or gaining exposure – it’s about reputation. Every brand, everywhere needs reputation management.

There are two sides to social media. On the one hand it has a never ending list of benefits, but on the other – severe repercussions for brands that ignore its cloud-based power. When your brand interacts with people, it invites feedback, good and bad. When this feedback is bad, it can bring your business to a grinding halt.

Celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, who have had to learn this the hard way, act as cautionary tales to businesses across the globe. Luckily, there are affordable social media management companies in the world that provide customized solutions for businesses that take social strategy seriously.

We do this for brands on a daily basis. With our “Social Media Success Path” we’ll help you build a presence online, while maintaining the integrity of your company. Instead of investing in template solutions, we collaborate with our clients so that they get the most out of their strategies.

The Social Media Success Path

Whatever your business goals may be on the internet, we’re equipped to help you achieve them, safely and efficiently. From a comprehensive consultation call, to profile setup, content creation and maintenance – our goal is always to see your business thrive in this social environment.

A big part of that is managing your social reputation. With years of experience handling client profiles, we’re confident that we can keep you on the right side of social feedback. If you’ve been looking for a social management partner, call Social Media Magic now, or contact us here.

What do you think about the Ashton Kutcher debacle? Are social management companies becoming indispensable? Leave your comment below!

Courtesy of davidrscott.wordpress.com

There never seems to be enough hours in the day to properly manage your social media strategy. When you learn how to do this on your Smartphone, suddenly – every spare moment you get, you can use to streamline your social campaigns to make more money. Smartphones are a highly effective time management tool!

Social Media Management

Managing your social presence means uploading the right apps to use on your Android or iPhone. Besides the obvious social apps (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc) you need a way to monitor, manage and measure your brand so that you’ll know when its time to interact, or respond to a conversation. There are many, many different apps to choose from that will help you do this.

Step 1: Get an Integrated Mobile Dashboard

When you get a social dashboard app for your Smartphone, it allows you to see your activity across all of your main social sites. Seesmic and TweetDeck are the most popular, but Hootsuite is also a gem – and you can add all of your dominant feeds to it for easy viewing. Once you have a social dashboard, you’ll be able to check-in and reply at lightning fast speeds.

You can also work on pre-scheduling new updates that publish at specific times. Dashboards likes these make checking-in on your pages as simple as accessing an app. They are all-in-one management tools, and will help you organize, plan, schedule and publish on the go, during your busy day.

Step 2: Get an App For Your Blog

Monitoring and replying to comments is essential for a blog to thrive. Android have made this particularly simple if you have a WordPress blog, with their WordPress app. This app lets you log in, and manage your blog from your phone. Once inside, you’ll be able to do pretty much everything you can do when sitting at a PC, including creating current blog posts on topics as they happen.

Step 3: Get Apps To Monitor The Conversation

Part of creating a dominant social presence means being aware of what is said about your brand. That’s why you should set Google Alerts for your iPhone, that go straight into your email inbox. From there, you’ll be able to review what is being said about your business, and can reply accordingly. This is a crucial part of creating a positive social presence.

Step 4: Get an App That Finds Great Apps

There are so many different apps out there that could make managing your social media presence that much easier – but they can be tough to find. So, while you’re at it, upload an app that finds apps based on specific keywords that you punch in. Then you’ll be able to select and use the best of them, whenever something new comes out! Try One Juicer, for all the greatest apps in your niche.

Once you have this basic set up established, you can manage and monitor your brand from anywhere. Stick to it, and keep evolving with convenient apps, and better ways to manage your presence from your Smartphone.

How do you manage your social media presence from your Smartphone? Please leave your comment below!

Courtesy of blog.abn.org.au

The answer of course, is yes. One wrong tweet or post can severely damage your business. That’s why social media monitoring is so important, and why social responsibility is such a hot topic at the moment.

Do you combine your business and personal personas online? Do you drastically limit what you say as a business? These questions and more are moving to the forefront of every social media strategist’s mind. And here it is, the number one problem with publishing a statement, idea or opinion that could end up harming your business…

Cross Promotion

Like any good marketer you’ve linked up all of your social media pages. When you add a Facebook post it’s published on your Twitter profile. You have a live Twitter stream on your website, your blog and your LinkedIn page. They are all connected, so when you publish a bad post on one platform – say hello to instant mass distribution.

Yes, it matters how many of your accounts are linked, and how large your following has become. It also matters how long you’ve left that dud post up on your complete social media profile. The point is, if you’ve managed to upset your followers somehow, you’re going to have to go into damage control mode.

One Mistake That Might Really Hurt Your Business

Depending on your industry, mistakes come in all shapes and sizes. A bad decision, a poor choice or an angry statement – all of these could have long term effects for the reputation of your business online. It is your number 1 concern to keep your business image intact on the internet.

If most of your business comes from online revenue, then you need to be extra careful. That’s not to say that a corporate ‘real-world’ giant can’t get hurt from online rumours and bad publicity – they certainly can (ask Nestle). Here are some basic tips on how to avoid one wrong comment from destroying your online rep.

1. Your Social Media Strategist

If you’re not taking an active interest in what your business is saying online, then you might find a world of problems heading your way soon. Be careful who you hire to manage your social media pages, make sure they’re professional and knowledgeable.

2. Keep ‘Funny’ on Your Personal Pages

There’s nothing endearing about a business that suddenly thinks posting funny cat Youtube videos on their profiles is going to somehow increase their likeability. As a business everything you post should be clean and professional.

3. Make The Right Choices in The Real World

If your social media pages are a true reflection of the way you do business, then be careful of the decisions that you make in the real world. A bad product, or a new direction for your business might send your current followers into a frenzy.

The truth is, one little tweet or post is probably not going to hurt your business that badly, if you manage it properly. That’s why you need to learn the art of online reputation management. Everyone makes mistakes. Just make sure yours are fixed fast and handled professionally. It doesn’t hurt to get a bit of a wake up call now and then – it matters what you do, always!

What one thing do you think could really damage a business online? Tell us below?