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If you’re using Facebook for business and your personal timeline isn’t linking to your business page, you’ve got a problem. Good news…this quick video will show you how to fix that–and it’s super easy! When a potential “friend” checks out your personal Timeline make sure they can link through to your proper business page on Facebook or you are missing a great opportunity to get more fans.
Recently I found this interesting e-mail in my inbox. The subject line (It only takes 10 minutes to have success in social media) really intrigued me as I often hear about these 10 minutes a day plans…heck…I even gave an example of my own of how I thought you could manage social media for your business in 20 minutes. It is possible to do this if you’re very focused and don’t allow yourself to get distracted. But when I read the plan suggested by this leading app developer, I was unpleasantly surprised. Here’s what I read:
“Focus on how to be social, not on how to do social”- Jay Baer
Monitoring your Social Media presence is incredibly important – but many business owners and marketers are concerned that it will take too much time.
Here are 5 steps that you can do over a cup of coffee and social media will become a healthy daily inbound marketing routine in just 10 minutes:
- Check Facebook stats (1 minute): Visit your company’s Facebook page and check out wall posts, new discussions and insights. You should also track number of likes per day using insights.
- Check Twitter for chatter about your company (2 minutes): Use tools like TweetDeck or, Hootsuite to monitor conversations about your company in real-time.
- Scan Google Alerts (1.5 minutes): Check Google alerts for your company name and products (as well as those of your competitors). To set up this enter your search items in a Google Alerts and select to received updates as they happen.
- Check your LinkedIn profile (3 minutes): Search for questions on LinkedIn that you or members of your company can answer. When you find a relevant question, respond and include a link to your website or, a relevant blog post.
- Use Google Reader to check latest updates (2.5 minutes): Set up reader for blogs of industry leaders, social media evangelists and relevant keyword search results.
Make sure you monitor, engage, and measure your social media presence each day, and remember it only takes 10 minutes to be successful.
Don’t get me wrong. These are great tips. Every business should be checking all of these things (whether you use Google Reader or something else is debateable, but you should be keeping up on industry blogs). This company seems to have missed their own point, however. Where’s the focus on “being social?” Only ONE of their five steps actually mentions “being social” (#4 indicates that you should engage in answering questions on LinkedIn).
Checking your posts, analytics, google alerts and industry blogs are all very useful, but they are not “engaging” in social media. If all you do is focus on these things for 10 minutes each day your social media strategy will be the next epic fail. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe they’re targeting much larger companies with Chief Marketing Officers who don’t have to do the engagement side of things and just look at the numbers? I’m not sure.
If you’ve only got 10 minutes to do your social media each morning while you’re drinking your coffee, here’s a better plan for your time:
In all honesty, that will probably take your whole 10 minutes–or more depending on what kinds of discussions you get into. If you have more time, now you have the chance to check your analytics and blog list. Don’t forget to comment on blog posts when you have something to say. It’s good for both your reputation and your SEO.
So, yes you can have success in social media in just 10 minutes a day, but you need to make sure you’re doing the things that are going to have the most immediate impact if you have limited time.
Whether or not social media is right for your business is no longer the question. The real question now is “Which social media platform is right” for your business. While some businesses are content to excel at one platform, many businesses are managing several networks to promote their products and services. To excel at THAT requires a little foresight and planning, and perhaps some useful social media resources. Here are my top five tips for managing multiple social media accounts for your business.
There are many social media management dashboards available on the market. They range in features and monitoring capabilities as well as in price. Hootsuite and TweetDeck are two of the most popular ones, the biggest difference being that Hootsuite is cloud based and TweetDeck is a program you download to your hard drive. Both have similar features and pricing, but advocates for each extol the virtues of their respective differences, of course. Click here for additional tips on using a social media dashboard. If you’re not quite ready to jump into a full-service dashboard, check out Buffer an even simpler, but very useful little program.
Actually, you’ll probably need to make a couple of different types of schedules. Mark in your calendar the days on which you will do analysis (i.e. check your Google analytics, bit.ly stats, ow.ly stats, Facebook insights and other specialized tools you may use). You’ll also need to make a daily schedule to help you focus your time if you want to keep your social media management to 10-20 minutes per day. Try focusing on one or two tasks per day and don’t let yourself get distracted. For example, one day could be commenting day and the next could be for Twitter follower management.
Creating your own Twitter lists can really help streamline your reading on Twitter. Make a list that contains the people you want to be sure not to miss. Then you can feel free to follow as many people as you want, only adding who you deem worthy to the “top list”. Make that list private if you don’t want to offend anyone, or publicize who’s in your “top list”. Create lists for your industry, city, competitors and association members. When Twitter is on your schedule it’s now easy to read what is relevant to you. Don’t forget to check out the lists that others have created and subscribe to the great ones to save time in creating your own.
If blogging is your nemesis, contact some other local bloggers to see if they would like to share posts. I have shared posts from Blue Boat Social Marketing, Daley Progress and Bate Media. Each of them has great content relevant to my audience and I like to promote other complementary local businesses.
Post to Facebook and LinkedIn twice a day. Tweet eight to ten times a day. Update Foursquare, TripAdvisor and Yelp profiles regularly. Blog once a week. Don’t forget about the monthly e-newsletter. What’s that new one called… Pinterest? And for goodness’ sake update your website content. WHEW. That’s a lot of work. Yes, consistency is important in maintaining your social media presence. Nobody is interested in a website that hasn’t been touched since 2009 or a Facebook Timeline that still has last season’s cover photo up, but it’s OK to take a day off. Don’t get your pixels in a pout if you miss out on your scheduled social media time for a day…or two. We’ll forgive you. Honest.
What are your best social media management tips for the business owner? Share them in the comments.
It’s not always easy using social media for business. Just when you get one thing figured out, something else crops up that you NEED to do. For example, maybe you’ve finally figured out how to post photos to your new Facebook Timeline. Now you’re thinking, “Hey. Wouldn’t it be great if people could see our {insert document here}?” So you try to post your PDF and it doesn’t work. Dang.
There is an easy solution to all your PDF sharing needs and it’s called Scribd (scr-eye-bd). Scribd has a fabulous, FREE app that will publish your PDF documents on a customizable Timeline tab.
Once you’ve created your account on Scribd and installed the app, share, share away! Here are some ideas of what you might want to share.
Menu
If you’re a restaurant, why not share your menu on Facebook? Let potential customers see what you have before they arrive. Make it tantilizing.
Brochure
Think about the possibilities for a summer camp sign-up brochure or a description of the services you offer. All the accessibility of a status update, but with all the branding.
Price List
This is a great one for salons. Make it easy for customers to plan their budget for a day of pampering.
Printables
The best Halifax example I’ve seen of this is Rebel Space Indoor Playground. One of the PDFs available on their Facebook Timeline is for a space themed birthday party invitation. Just print, cut and hand out. I’m guessing busy moms love this one.
Checklists
There is lots of potential in this for professional organizers, real estate agents, decorators, insurance agents and even contractors. Give your clients a check list to help them organize their time, pantry, meals, renovation budget, household contents or even social media passwords.
The possibilities truly are endless. What’s the first PDF you’re going to add to your Facebook Timeline?
Can you afford to spend just five minutes on a Friday watching a video that will help you with your social media management? Can you afford NOT to? Come back to the Twirp Communications blog every second Friday for just five minutes and walk away with a practical skill that you can implement for your social media strategy.
Today’s tutorial will show you how to quickly and easily use Hootsuite to recycle some of your blog content. You’ve spent hours writing those blog posts and I’m guessing you only post them once. You’ve got new followers since then and many of your previous followers probably didn’t see the post the first time around, or didn’t have time to read it right then. Why not share your best content with your followers again?
I’m not suggesting that you repost every article 20 times in two weeks. That would just annoy your followers. What I am suggesting is that you set up your BEST, most useful, most popular content to repost six months or a year down the road. As long as the content is evergreen it’s likely still useful. Talking about social media for business, I do have to be careful that I don’t post articles with tips that are no longer relevant because the platforms change so frequently. For a restaurant, retail location, business coach or insurance agent, that’s probably not an issue.
Now, take five minutes to watch the video below and then please take a minute extra to give me your feedback and any ideas for future video tutorials. Thanks! And now…. on with the shoooooo.
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