Module 4. Session 3: Social Media Tools

Transcription

1 Twitter Module 4 Session 3: Social Media Tools Best Practices

2 Table of Contents Best Practices / Tips & Tricks 1 Focus On Maximizing Your Efforts 1 Tools Have Limitations 1 Tools Are Important 1 Find Tools That Are Comfortable To Use 2 Focus On Tools That Increase Productivity 2 Tools Cannot Replace Human Analysis & Marketing Expertise 2 Develop Calendar/Schedule 3 Use Tool to Measure Impact On Activities 3

3 Welcome to session 3: social media tools best practices. Now that we have introduced you to a whole bunch of new tools that you can use to help yourself be a whole lot more effective and make social media a better use of your time, what we want to do is kind of give you some ideas of general best practices and tips and tricks and that sort of thing to make sure that you are using these tools effectively. Best Practices / Tips & Tricks Focus On Maximizing Your Efforts The first thing that you want to do is you want to make sure that you are focusing on maximizing your efforts, rather than automating them. If you are getting average results, don t be focused on automating those average results. Put some effort into getting good results, or even great results and then, slowly shift your focus more towards automating them. What that means is you should be prioritizing the types of tools that you are using and using the ones that are going to help you make sure that you are getting more reach from your updates. Make sure that you are getting more followers from your updates and growing your community, priory to just focusing on tools that will automate all your messages going out. Put the priority on maximizing efforts first and automation second. Tools Have Limitations The next tip is to realize that every tool has its limitations and that you must augment accordingly, or if one tool has reached its ability to do its job for you in your situation, don t be afraid to get rid of that tool and find a new one to take its place. Social media is constantly evolving and so are the tools and the different apps that you can use with your social media marketing, so just keep that in mind. We have gone through a whole bunch of different platforms through our time. That list of 10 that I gave you, in my opinion, are amongst the top 10 that are out there, but there are literally dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of different tools that can help you with your Twitter marketing. You need to look at each tool accordingly. You need to take a look at it and make sure that it is going to meet your needs, it has got all the features and functions built in that you are looking for and compare that tool to other tools that are like it in the market. Tools Are Important The next heads up for you here is that as your networks continue to grow, as you continue to build your Twitter followers and you are following more and more people and your account is growing at a quicker pace, social media management tools will become increasingly more important to you. It becomes a lot harder to pick out the centers of influence and pick out 1

4 the influential people when you have a whole bunch more followers. You are going to want to rely on tools to help you do different aspects and different tasks when it comes to social media marketing. Find Tools That Are Comfortable To Use Another tip here is find tools that you are comfortable using. I have mentioned, when we were going through the tools, that amongst my favorites were Buffer and HootSuite and really, Buffer and HootSuite are kind of similar to a certain extent. They have some similarities, but neither one of those tools would replace the other one in my opinion. Those are just the two tools that I am comfortable using, that I train my people to use. We have used Sprout Social before and it is a great tool, don t get me wrong, I just felt before comfortable using Hoot- Suite. I felt that I could maximize the different features that it had and that it really did the trick for what we were after. It doesn t mean it is going to be the best tool for you though, so that s why I gave you a wide variety of different tools to go and explore and to take a look at. There may be a tool out there that is a better fit for you that I didn t mention in this video, so do some research, make a list of the must-haves and make a list of the would-be-nice-to-haves and use that list to go out and find a tool that is going to do the trick for you. Most of these tools either have a free trial, or they have a free account and then, they offer an upgraded account for paid subscription, so you should be able to have an opportunity, with most of these tools, to try it out for a while and see what you think and see if you like it. Focus On Tools That Increase Productivity Make sure that you are focusing on tools that will help you and your team increase your productivity. Now, there may be tools out there that can automate different tasks and that can help you to be more effective online, but if those tools slow you down, if those tools take longer for you to get them to do what it is you want them to do, then that is killing your productivity. You have got to make sure that you maintain that balance and you have got to keep an eye out on the productivity standpoint, making sure that you are keeping productivity up and keeping your efforts effective and efficient. Tools Cannot Replace Human Analysis & Marketing Expertise Now, this is a really important tip that everybody needs to see. Social media tools cannot take the place of human analysis and marketing expertise, especially when it comes to a lot of analytic tools. It is important to understand what exactly the data that you are looking at is. If you understand the data that you are looking at, you can make far better decisions, you can put together far better campaigns because you understand what the numbers mean. If you are looking at an analytics tool and you don t quite understand some of the things that they 2

5 are talking about, take a break, pause and go into Google and do a search, do a little bit of research and get yourself educated as to what those numbers mean. Analysis, when it comes to marketing in the digital age, is paramount to your success. You need to be able to understand the numbers, understand what it is that they are measuring and look and see what things that you are doing will impact those numbers, whether it makes them better, or makes them worse. So, marketing in the digital age is really almost like a mixture between creative and science and in my opinion, especially in the realm of inbound marketing, or internet marketing, it is becoming a lot more scientific than it is really the creative side of things, so focus on understanding the analytics. If you can t, if that is not your strength, find somebody who can assist you, that can help interpret what those numbers mean. Develop Calendar/Schedule The next step is to develop a calendar, or schedule, to help you make the most of your social media tools and activities. You have a calendar, where you can make a list of the different updates that you are going to make. Maybe there are themes, maybe you have weekly themes of information that you want to share and that you want to talk about. Maybe you are trying to do social media marketing and integrate it with the different holidays that are going on, different promos and sales and information that you are writing about based on the holidays, or the time of the year, or the time of the month and that sort of thing. The other thing is creating an actual schedule for yourself, so schedule, or block out time in your calendar to do your social media marketing. If you don t make time to go in and learn how to use the tools, figure out your updates and whether you are scheduling those and putting them in queue to be broadcast out, if you are not taking the time, or blocking the time to do those things, you will find that you will get caught up in your business and it is going to be one of those things that just falls to the wayside. That is where the whole consistency key really comes into play. If you want to be successful with social media, you have to be consistent. Use Tool to Measure Impact On Activities The last tip here is making sure that you are using tools to chart and measure the impact of your activities over time. Again, this comes back to what your business goals are, what your marketing goals are, what you want to achieve in your business and how can you use the tool of social media, or the tool of Twitter, to hit those goals and to meet those objectives. Once you take a look at that and figure out what the key performance indicator is, what is it that you can measure that is going to indicate whether or not it is a success, or it is a failure, then that 3

6 is what you want to track over time. That becomes your bench mark, so the types of updates that you are putting out, your update frequency, which channels you are using, all of that stuff is going to be determined by that metric that you have decided that is going to indicate your success. So, make sure that you are using those tools and make sure that you are tracking your efforts. There is a quote that I commonly refer back to when it comes to marketing and data and that s, what gets measured can be improved. If you are not measuring it, you don t know what kind of impact you are having. That brings us to the end of module 4. In module 4, session 1: We talked about what are the benefits of third-party tools. We went into detail on how they can help you to be more efficient and more effective with your time. We talked about how these tools can help you to build your brand awareness, help you get your message out and build an online community and a number of the other different types of tasks that you can do using these different third-party tools. In the second session, we got into talking about 10 different tools that will help you to maximize your effectiveness on Twitter. We covered a whole variety of different types of tools, from how do we identify influencers to how we automate some of them in certain tasks to save us time, as well as how do we measure our efforts and determine whether or not what we are doing is actually working. Then, we followed that up with this session, session 3, where we talked about different social media tools best practices and some really solid tips for moving forward with your social media. Thanks for joining me for module 4 and I will see you in module 5. 4