Managing your Twitter and Facebook accounts
Managing your social media marketing campaign needs careful consideration as time will be a factor if you’re doing it all yourself. You also need to consider how you can measure the success of the campaign as nobody wants to do all this Tweeting and posting for nothing.
Building up followers and fans and interacting with them takes up a lot of time. So how much time should you spend on it if you’re a SME owner doing all this yourself?
At a recent seminar on social media networking, it was suggested that people should spend an hour a day initially, broken down into chunks of about 20 minutes at least three times a day. In addition, if your business has an international market, it’s wise to try and Tweet at times of the day when the whole world is likely to be online, estimated to be from 7am to 9am and 7pm to 9pm.
Realistically, it’s unlikely that, as a busy SME owner, you have that much time to spare in one day. You could always get an employee to do it for you but you need to ensure that person can reliably project your business interests and integrity. You can of course outsource the social networking to an internet marketing company but, there again, you need to make sure that they understand your business vision and can project you and your business in an appropriate manner.
There are some useful time saving tools online that can help you with Twitter and Facebook posting. Social RSS is a Facebook application that allows you to add favourite RSS feeds to your business page. So you can add a feed from your website or blog so that when it updates, it automatically sends an update to the Facebook page. You can also add a Twitter application to the Facebook page so that any Facebook status updates automatically update your Twitter status too.
Other free Twitter tools include TweetDeck, which we described in an earlier blog post; Monitter, which tells you in real time when somebody is discussing a particular chosen topic; Twellow – a Twitter directory where you can find other Tweeple in your industry, location or with similar interests;and Hootsuite which is similar to TweetDeck but has additional groovy tools for scheduling Tweets, viewing other user info and viewing threaded conversations.
But all this effort could amount to a hill of beans if there’s no return on the investment your time. You need to be able to measure the effect that Twitter may have had on your website traffic, if that is your purpose in using it. Hootsuite has a tracking tool that will keep account of how many links were clicked on and where the users are from. But don’t forget Google Analytics which is a great way of finding out how many visitors to your site were referred there by Twitter.
So now you’re a Tweeting, Facebooking expert, we hope you have fun. Just don’t forget to Mention us in return to tell us how helpful we are! You can find us on Twitter and Facebook.
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