As a small business, when you have to manage your social media marketing yourself, it can get difficult to get the results you need in a timely fashion. It’s not enough to just post a few updates regularly, have a presence on a couple of social networks and hope for the best. Rather, you need a good strategy in place and a very active presence, preferably on multiple platforms. With a good social media management tool, though, you can not only save a lot of time, but you can also greatly improve your overall results from social media.
In this Article, I’ll share with you some top tips on how to make the best use of your social media management tool in order to get the best possible results for your small business.
Get the most out of monitoring
One of the main features you’ll find in most social media management tools is monitoring. This is a very important feature for businesses of all kinds and sizes, but in the case of small businesses, it can really help you get your social media presence off the ground.
- Monitor mentions of your brand – as a small business, you might not be getting as many mentions of your brand on social media, but it’s still important to monitor this so you don’t lose any opportunities for engagement, or disregard any customer service issues, for example. A fast response rate is essential on social media, so you need to always be on top of any mentions, positive or negative.
- Find opportunities for engagement – this is where monitoring features really make a difference for small businesses. If you’re trying to get more new followers, expand your reach and improve your brand awareness, you need to engage as much as possible. Make a list of the keywords that your target audience would use and set up a few searches for them. Check them often to see what people are talking about and where possible, jump into conversations. Some tools, like Agorapulse, also allow you to add a list of words that you want them to ignore from a search, or alternatively you can set up a moderation rule where the tool takes a particular action (assign to a team member, approve, tag or flag it) whenever those keywords are used.
Discover potential leads – monitoring can also help you discover potential leads, which you can then follow up either on social media, or on other channels, such as e-mail. In some cases, you might be able to find users actively looking for a business like yours; but in most cases, it’s a question of finding potential leads and then starting to build a relationship with them in order to eventually get them to convert.
Make the most out of brand ambassadors and social influencers
One of the best ways to get more out of your social media, is to connect with social media influencers and build mutually beneficial relationships with them.
Start by checking out your list of followers to see if there are any already following you. Agorapulse, for example, tags any influencers and brand ambassadors that you have in your list so that you can easily identify them. Otherwise, you can use tools like Buzzsumo to find relevant influencers in your niche.
Once you’ve found them, it’s time to start engaging. Many of today’s social media management tools have pretty good CRM tools, such as Agorapulse Sendible, and Sprout Social, which help you keep better track of your audience:
- Organize your list of followers and influencers with tags (this is also helpful when it comes to identifying and nurturing potential leads)
- Make notes for each of your important contacts so that you have any relevant, important information on them handy
- See all past conversations with a user so that you’re always in the loop