Seven strategies to stay ahead of overwhelming social media change
Nov 18th
Can we have an honest conversation among friends?
Trying to keep up with social media is overwhelming!
Little wonder. We are living in the middle of an unprecedented frenzy of change.
When was the last time there was an innovation in television that impacted the way we marketed? 1975 – cable TV, and now, arguably, the move toward asynchronous viewing on mobile devices. If you do a lot of print advertising, the fundamentals have been the same since the advent of the printing press in 1450!
But social media? Not only do the social media platforms shift every day, the rules of engagement are changing constantly, too. Can anybody on earth keep up with the real and rumored changes just to Facebook’s EdgeRank formula?
What we considered best practices six months ago are passe’ today. Yes, social media is overwhelming, especially when there is pressure to master every new platform that comes along.
But as a professional marketer, you must keep up. How is this possible? Here are seven ideas to help you stay calm and carry on.
Master the marketing fundamentals. The most effective coping mechanism for me has been having deep experience in marketing fundamentals. Yes, the platforms keep changing, but the basics of marketing and consumer behavior don’t. So if you can view technological change through the lens of marketing fundamentals, you can more easily weed out the stuff that just isn’t going to make it. If you’re serious about a career in social media marketing, focus on learning the “marketing” part.
Form a support group. You can’t possibly keep up with everything and neither can your friends. But together, you can make a dent in it. I have a few trusted friends who are more techy or more SEO-y than me. Together we can help each other by discussing the latest trends over lunch once a month. This gives me just enough juice to be at least be conversant in a topic.
Consider a focus area. This is a hard thing to think about, but maybe you CAN’T keep up with everything and you need to focus on specialties. I’m starting to see consultants specialize in LinkedIn, Facebook, and video marketing and that’s probably a smart idea because you have a chance to be an expert in at least one thing. I am struggling with this first, because I teach survey college courses so I have to know something about everything. And frankly, I am having a hard time focusing because I don’t want to miss anything. Everything is interesting to me.
Go where your customers are. Look, maybe it’s time to give up on Path or even (gasp) Google+ and simply stay on top of the platforms relevant to your customers.
Give yourself a time limit. Are you reading social media blog posts in bed? Maybe it’s time for a self-imposed time limit to force yourself to focus and prioritize.
Eliminate engagement guilt. Here is a hard lesson I have had to come to terms with: The more successful you are, the less ability you have to engage with your fans and followers. I hate that. But if I tried to maintain the level of engagement I had even a year ago I would not just be overwhelmed, I would be insane. As your tribe builds, you simply have to adjust and come to grips that with the fact that you have a life beyond social media. Some thing are going to slip through the cracks. Allow that to be OK.
The curation answer … or not. Now an obvious idea to keep up with social media trends is to go to a highly-respected curated source of content on key social media developments. Here’s the problem (and a business opportunity). This does not exist, at least not any place that meets my needs. Mashable? Too much crap. Social Media Examiner? An excellent site but too much of a focus on “how-to” posts.
Where do you guys go for your one-stop shopping for a manageable amount of social media tech and business highlights? Besides {grow} of course? (wink) How are you coping with the amount of change in this field?
8 Indispensable Tools to Improve Your Social Media Efficiency
Nov 1st
By {grow} Community Member Ian Cleary
Being organized with your social media efforts is essential because it can be so time consuming.
It’s easy to spend many hours on social media but are you using that time effectively?
Here are 8 tools that I use on a regular basis that helped me be more effective and efficient on social media and hopefully it will help you too!
1. Monitor and Build Relationships on Twitter with Commun.it
Commun.it provides functionality to help build and monitor relationships with Twitter followers. I only need to spend a couple of minutes a day on Commun.it but it gives me some valuable actionable information, such as:
- Influencers who have interacted with me but I haven’t reciprocated.
- Suggested people to follow
- Opportunities to engage with people based on keywords that I’m tracking (e.g. my company name
- Identify people who are sharing my content that I should reciprocate by sharing their content
Figure 1 Influencers Sharing out My Content that I should engage with
2. Market Your Content Using Triberr
Triberr is a community of bloggers who help promote each other’s content by sharing it out on social networks.
Members join tribes and these tribes are based around particular topics and values. There is a high value placed on supporting fellow bloggers and providing value!
When you login you can see all the latest posts from tribe members and then you can easily share it out across a variety of networks.
In the example below there is an article from Jim Dougherty that has been shared out 11 times so far. When I read the article I just click on the approve button to share out on Twitter if I think my audience would benefit from the article.
If you join the right tribe it can be a great source of content to share and you can learn a lot from your community members.
3. Track the Influencer Blogs Using Google Reader
Google Reader is a useful tool for reading blog posts from many bloggers in one place instead of visiting individual websites. If you’re organized enough using Google Reader you can get through a lot of content quite quickly.
One great tip I picked up from Kristi Hynes was to use the Twitter name as the name of your blog feed. This means that when you read a piece of content that you want to share, you immediately have the Twitter name ready so you don’t have to look it up.
How many times have you searched around for a Twitter user name before you can share out some content?
4. Find Great Content Using Bottlenose
Bottlenose is a tool for tracking news and trends across social networks. I’m passionate about “social media tools” so I like to track conversations about tools on social networks. Bottlenose provides me with relevant information on this topic.
I can filter out information based on a topic I’m interested in and see the latest news related to that topic, tweets and trending topics related to that area on Twitter.
5. Tidy Up Using ManageFlitter
ManageFlitter helps you identify people to follow and unfollow and provides analytics on your account.
I mainly use the unfollow functionality. It can identify people you are following who are not following you back and then categorize them so you can identify the obvious ones to unfollow. For example:
- Followers tweeting in a language not native to you
- People who follow a lot of people but don’t get many followers
- People who are not active on Twitter
- People who are tweeting too much
6. Share Content With BufferApp
BufferApp provides a very easy way to share content in the most effective way. When you come across an interesting article you click on the ‘buffer’ button in your browser and a tweet is created and put into a queue.
It then goes out on the next available time slot which you set up.
This is very useful because I may come across 10 articles at one time worth sharing but there’s no point in sharing them all at the same time. Also, it may not be the most appropriate time to share it out.
One tip I got from my friend Nate Riggs is to use Socialflow to work out the best times to send out a tweet. So Bufferapp with Socialflow is a great combination!
7. Analyze Results Using Google Analytics
After all our social media activity we generally want to drive relevant traffic to our website. Google Analytics provides very relevant information related to this:
- Social Traffic- Google provides me details on where traffic is coming from
- Goals- When traffic does arrive from social media channels I want to track this to see what conversion I’m getting. It’s great getting traffic but if it’s not converting then we’re wasting our time. Tracking goals is a very quick way of seeing if we’re making progress.
8. Launch It All Using Bookmarks!
I don’t like to spend my day opening and closing all these applications. So a very simple tip is to bookmark all the tools in one folder and then you can open them up in one go!!!
Bookmarking is available with all browsers and it’s a simple way of keeping track of websites that you want to visit again.
By putting the bookmarks into a folder I can open them all in one go. On Safari this creates a tab for every application.
I’m always looking for useful new ideas and apps? Will you share your favorite in the comment section?
Ian Cleary is a Social Media Tools Specialist. He is the founder of Razorsocial, a website that provides sharp insights on social media tools. Follow Ian on twitter @ianmcleary
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-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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