Cloud Gen | Category | Social Media

I don’t need to tell you how effective involvement in social media is essential for your business growth but effective here is a keyword. Social websites are not called social for no reason: they are friendly in nature. To succeed in SMM, you need to focus on building relationships and avoid the sales pitch or at least make it subtle.

It goes without saying that the process can be time-consuming especially with the avalanche of social media options out there. So, how can you leverage SMM without investing too much time into it? Here are some tips to help you out.

Tip 1: Go for cost effective delegation that yields proven results

I often feel that doubling or tripling the number of my page fans/friends on Facebook is both time-consuming and boring until I was browsing a freelancing site and found this interesting job post:” I am looking for someone to add friends to my Facebook account from a certain city. I’m looking to have 3000 friends added from certain area.”

Guess what, the employer offered $15 for this job and there many candidates were lined up. The beauty of hiring freelancers to do the “donkey work” on your behalf is that you save your precious time for what really matters plus there is no risk involved here since you only pay for results. In fact, I would recommend that you browse job postings in some freelancing sites to get more ideas for time-saving tasks that you can delegate. A good place to check is oDesk because they have category for SMM jobs.

In addition, if writing is not your cup of tea, it is worthwhile to hire a SEO copywriter to take care of your blog content because if your blog didn’t standout to your niche market, others will and you certainly don’t want that.

Also, hiring a professional to do few short yet excellent video presentations about your business to be published on YouTube and your own site is definitely an investment in place.

Time is money. Sometimes”buying” some of your precious time for few bucks can be a sound decision. And if you take the freelancing sites route, you will always end up with a good deal.

Tip 2: Be Selective

You need to be very selective and choose the best social media sites that are in line with your business goals. In doing so, think quality versus quantity. In other words, it is better to have quality profiles in 3 social sites and take the time to create a powerful presence there than just creating profiles in 1000 sites that you probably wouldn’t visit again! As a minimum, you need to go for Twitter, Facebook plus your own blog. And hey, YouTube is a fantastic visibility magnet so keep it in mind! Later on, you may also add LinkedIn to the mix.

Tip 3: Leverage Technology

There are so many free tools available online that helps you preschedule your social media posts, the most popular of which is ping.fm. You can dedicate 2 hours per week for prescheduling your posts and that’s it!

Having said that, it is important to realize that these automatic tools only take care of the “broadcasting” side of social media on your behalf. You still need to be effectively present in some carefully selected social media sites in order to answer questions, interact, and build relationships with your niche market. Good luck!

A reputable online presence can become quite a hassle, especially with the numerous social platforms available. However, you cannot give up on social media marketing simply because it is time-consuming.

Fortunately, your efforts can be a lot less tasking if you use 3 of the best social media tools for marketing. This selection of social tools help in establishing a strong social media presence, as well as managing and controlling your online reputation.

1. HootSuite

The ability to schedule posts is a major advantage with this management tool. Having a predetermined schedule of posts enables you to maintain your online presence even during odd hours of the day. This also increases your efficiency and helps in time management, since HootSuite can post to several social sites including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

This app has the capacity to monitor activity on posts you make in various social sites. Instead of checking through each social site, you can easily monitor activity through only one platform. For a busy marketer, such a facility that offers convenience and saves on time is definitely a must-have. No wonder this particular social media tool is quite popular with many marketers.

2. Advocate

Advocate is a great asset to any company, since it maximizes on the social connections of the employees. The combined reach through employees’ personal profiles is usually more than the company’s social media profile. Therefore, having a tool that takes advantage of this wider exposure will substantially multiply your social media marketing efforts.

Advocate is simply installed as a browser plugin through which employees can get content recommendations from the marketing team. The marketing team can also evaluate the accumulated engagement created by the shared content by each employee. Moreover, employees can also give recommendations to the marketing team through Advocate or even share content with one another.

3. Mention

In order to succeed in your marketing efforts, you also need to safeguard your reputation on social sites. These requires regular monitoring of comments and posts concerning your company. Mention is very effective in doing just that. This beneficial tool is helpful in capturing any ‘mentions’ of your company across various social platforms. You will easily identify any negative comments, thus enabling you to take appropriate action to correct the negative image. Furthermore, identifying the mentions concerning your business will give you a clear picture of your company’s reach through your marketing efforts. This will help in deciding the best and most effective marketing strategies to employ on social media.

Mention also has various control settings for identifying specific sources for monitoring. This means that you can opt to identify mentions within Facebook only and not from any of the other social sites. However, the sources that are turned off can still be monitored through the spam folder – just incase you still need to assess activity on other social sites.

By using the best social media tools for marketing, you will have more time to focus on crucial matters in your business and also achieve a much wider reach across various social platforms.