Social Media Management – A Growing Marketing Solution for Businesses
Internet marketing such as social media can make it faster for both a business and its clients to engage, interact, and collaborate with each other. But as technology is changing at a fast pace and this includes anything internet-based, it will seem that social media marketing may become more time-consuming and labor-intensive just to monitor, let alone manage, everything that goes on in it.
Social media management is a marketing solution to help business owners or marketers manage incoming and outbound online interactions on all their social media accounts while continuously marketing by updating content. It streamlines and consolidates all business marketing activities in real-time that are taking place over the business’ social media networks like Facebook and Twitter as well as on blogs and even the business’ own website.
This type of monitoring of social media marketing allows the business to see what people are saying about the business in real-time and to automate the process of replying to and to outgoing messages even when handling multiple social media sites all at the same time. It helps ramp up the online business presence using these multiple social media sites.
What Can Social Media Management Tools Do for You?
Social media management tools can also help in integrating social networking activities with other non-social media marketing campaigns. For instance, social media marketing can synchronize with offline marketing such as events and research papers, e-mail marketing (e-mailing potential clients to like your new products on Facebook), search engine marketing campaigns (getting people to use your old and new keywords when searching), and even updating content on the business website such as articles and videos.
While word of mouth may have been good during the pre-internet era, now imagine how word of mouth may sound and feel by using social media, as if word of mouth now contains testosterone thanks to social media. Not only can you hear and feel what your customers are saying and feeling about your company and products, but you also get to monitor your competitors and the industry as a whole.
The Advantages of Using Social Media Management in Your Business
Social media management means keeping in pace with everything that your customers throw your way, whether good or bad, and reacting in all the good ways to all this in order to create a more positive environment surrounding your brand. In this way, social media or internet marketing builds up your company’s credibility. When your credibility continues to climb, you can more easily build up your expertise and link to more customers and prospects faster.
In another way, it can also do the proper damage control should something go wrong with one of your products and services and you get a barrage of negative comments. Social media management allows you to immediately respond to complaints and negative comments. It can even steer customers to other marketing programs.
If all is done in its proper manner, social media sites can give you a bird’s eye view and a more detailed idea of what prospective customers really need at that given moment and increase your brand’s visibility based on these needs. Remember that all these things begin with the basics:
- Creating content for multiple accounts, monitoring the views, and deciding which comments to approve and respond to.
- Monitoring Twitter followers for conversations that you need to join in as well as checking the RSS reader for relevant ideas.
- Checking on Google Alerts how your business is faring when mentioned on the web.
- Monitoring business communities such as LinkedIn.