Monitor Your Social Media Presence in Three Easy Steps

Lara Wiltshire | 21 August 2012

So you now have all these social media tools and a Social Media Marketing plan up and running but how can you best take advantage of the limited time you have in a day to get the best results possible from them? You want to be able to monitor your social media campaigns as efficiently and effectively as possible right? RIGHT!

It's at this point that I must mention that the more time you spend using social media tools the greater your benefit (ROI) will be. Research has shown (from the 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report by Social Media Examiner) that 69% of marketers who were using social media as part of their marketing efforts increased traffic or subscribers to their websites, and 58% generated qualified leads for their business.  It's important, so let's get started.

How to monitor your social media:

1. Set Goals

It's a good idea to start by knowing what you want to accomplish by monitoring your social media efforts.  Do you want to increase thought leadership, generate leads / sales / industry buzz? Or do you want to find conversations that drive traffic to your website?

By knowing and understanding your specific goals you will be able to target and direct your efforts to reach those goals.

2. Determine what To Monitor

Try not to be overwhelmed with the variety of social media platforms, tackle them one at a time and soon you will be a pro.

Facebook:

Your business page timeline is where it all happens.  You can see what your business fans, friends, suspects, prospects, customers and critics have said and how they have interacted with each other.  You can see if they have posted questions, comments or feedback to your company. Alongside being able to see how people interact on your Facebook page you need to post on your company page as well. But don't go overload your Facebook page with zillions of posts a day, best practices for Facebook suggest one to two posts per day as the ideal number (from Hubspot).

Twitter:

Be proactive with Twitter; post fresh content daily (more than once a day ideally) ensuring that you link back to landing pages so you can capture more information on your prospects.  Twitter can be a veritable information overload platform with valuable information being passed over thanks to the sheer quantity of information provided. do.not.be.scared.off! You will be looking for:

  • Relevant questions about your company and industry
  • Requests for information
  • Tweets that intentionally or unintentionally need feedback (complaints or praise)

LinkedIn:

This platform is specifically for networking, recruiting, generating thought leadership and promoting content. So get in there and join LinkedIn answers and group discussions.

3. Be Smart With Your Time

Streamline your process!

Schedule posts and tweets for the week ahead of time freeing you up to engage with your prospects and respond to their queries.

Use RSS feeds, that way what you are interested in comes to you rather than you having to go look for it every day.

Use scheduling tools like HubSpot, Tweetdeck or Hootsuit to help.  You can save searches and react via the tool itself without even needing to log in to Twitter.

And when all else fails - scan, filter and flag what may be interesting so you can come back to it at a later date.

The thing with social media is you need a schedule so you know where and when you want to post, tweet or share information and content.  This sort of communication can be planned and pre scheduled.  Responding to suspect, prospect or customer questions or queries is more ad hoc and is unplanned but still needs your attention.  

Once you get into the flow of social media you will find your own groove that works for you. 

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