Social media in an hour a day
Recently I was “talking shop” with my fellow social media colleagues. A hot topic that came up was working with clients and the expectations that many have. When a company starts getting involved with social media, this is what most will think:
- Social media can be automated to take a little time as possible
- Social media is going to give them a huge boost in traffic immediately
What generally lacks in this equation is the entire setup of social media. Most companies can’t hit the ground running with a Twitter account or Facebook account. Even publishers with hundreds of thousands of print and web subscribers can have trouble garnering more than 200 Facebook followers.
If you’ve already started with social media or are considering making your accounts more than automated robots, go through this checklist to decide if you have enough of a foundation to solicit followers and fans:
- Do you have enough content to push on a daily basis? At least one post?
- Are you willing to make friends with your competitors and share their content in the hope that they’ll share yours?
- Have you made a list of people you know, who will be your starting base of fans and followers?
- Do you have other goals for social media other than pushing content?
- Do you have time to manage several social media accounts?
The biggest complaint from most companies is that there isn’t enough time in the day to add one more to-do to their list. This is absolutely true. Editors were first faced with adapting to the web for their content. Then they had to think about search engine optimization. Now they have to learn social media and share their content too? Isn’t a raise in order?
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Probably, yes. But that’s not for me to decide. Social media can absolutely be automated. Sites like TwitterFeed can turn your RSS feed into an effortlessly updated stream of your content. In an ideal world, you’d be tweeting your headlines manually, using hashtags and using the @ symbol wherever possible. However, many companies have built a decent following just by brand recognition and a feed of their content.
The area that does need to be monitored, however, is your feed of mentions. My favorite slide in a social media presentation is when I get to show the client all of the times that potential customers and current readers have tried to contact them, with no response.
If you have a Twitter Feed, go to Search.Twitter.com and type in your Twitter handle. For example, if we wanted to see every time someone has mentioned us or tried to talk to us, we’d search “@mequoda”. I can’t even tell you the amount of times I’ve seen people practically begging to give a company money by asking about a product or event and are returned with no response.
So that’s it. I can preach all day about how involved you should be in social media, but today I’m going to stick to the most effortless approach. Social media is a long-tail strategy. It’s going to be a little shorter of a tail the more time you put into it, but if your resources are being stretched too thin, then it’s OK. Just remember that it’s called SOCIAL media for a reason. You’re going to make more friends being the life of the party rather than the wallflower.
