Welcome to this section of The Big Social Media Book on how to manage all of your social media platforms in less than thirty minutes a day. Hopefully by now you have read all the excellent articles in this book on the various social media platforms, and now realize why it is essential for any business to be online and active on the major social media platforms. But just in case you are still not completely convinced, here are a few statistics which should sway you:
93% of marketers use social media for business. Do you really want to be one of the 7% who don’t?
83% Of Twitter users expect a Same-Day Customer Service response to a complaint.
More than 88% of consumers are influenced by other consumers’ online comments.
For online retailers, Facebook accounted for 79% of social logins during Q2 of 2013.
So you do need to be active on the social media platforms in 2013, because your competitors surely will be, and you will get left behind if you aren’t. But how do you find the time to become active on all the major social media platforms?
One of the most common complaints we receive from small business owners is “Yes, I know we need to be using Twitter and Facebook, but where are we going to find the time, we are already working twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week just running our business. We just don’t have the time to spend all day on Facebook like my niece does.” Well that is where we come in, and we are going to show you a method of keeping up to date and active on all the major social media platforms, and do it in well less than half an hour a day, and all done using free programs and tools.
In order to save a bit of time, we are going to make a couple of assumptions:
[1] You have already done your keyword research, and have a list of the most popular keywords and phrases for your business/industry, and a list of your direct competitors;
[2] You have already signed up for accounts at all of the major social media platforms relevant to your business, and followed best practices in setting up the accounts, as outlined in the other sections of this book.
If you haven’t done these yet, then please go ahead and do them first, then read on.
Summary of the Marketing Game Plan
We will be using three tools for this game plan, all are available as free versions as well as paid versions, but we will only need the free versions for this exercise. Later on, you can decide for yourself whether or not you want to upgrade to the paid versions, but for now all you want are the free versions. The programs we will be using are HootSuite, Evernote, and Flipboard.
HootSuite is an all-in-one program, which lets you see all of your social media accounts in one dashboard, and you can post to all platforms at once, post to only selected platforms, and even schedule your posts to be published at a later time, which is a huge time-saver. There is much more available inside HootSuite, but we will cover the details later.
Evernote is a cloud-based archiving platform where you can store articles and blog posts to read later, and organize them into categories. And Flipboard is a mobile phone app which lets you store articles and blog posts, and read them later in a magazine style, but a magazine where you dictate exactly what the content is.
All three of these tools are available for all the major desktop computers, mobile phones and tablets, so you can literally use this system anywhere, any time.
Marketing Game Plan
Please note that the initial setting up for the game plan is a right royal pain, but it only has to be done once, then you are ready to go. We suggest putting aside a half of a quiet day like a Sunday to setting everything up. It won’t take you that long, but if you commit the time to doing it you will be less likely to rush through it and balls something up.
Evernote
[1] Sign up for a free Evernote account. Go to http://evernote.com/ and download the program for your computer. While you are there, install the bookmarklet from http://evernote.com/webclipper/ for your favourite web browser, this is an important part of the game plan.
[2] Using your mobile phone, and tablet if you have one, install the Evernote app on every mobile device you have, then sign in to Evernote on all devices. This will synchronize all of your notes so you can read and edit everything on all devices.
[3] Set up separate folders inside Evernote for all the popular keywords in your business, and you are ready to go with Evernote.
Flipboard
[1] Install the Flipboard app on all of your mobile phones and tablets, and activate your account. Create a magazine for your industry (call it ‘Industry News’ or whatever you like). You can also set up magazines for your hobbies and anything else you are interested in as well if you like. Then sign in to Flipboard on all of your devices, Flipboard will synchronize all devices automatically, and Flipboard is now ready to go.
HootSuite
[1] Sign up for a free HootSuite account. Go to https://hootsuite.com/ and sign up. Download and install the web-based application for your favourite web browser at https://hootsuite.com/features/extensions and go to the app directory for your mobile phones and tablets and install the HootSuite app for all of your devices.
Then open up the Plugins/Extensions option in your favourite web browser and find and install the HootSuite bookmarklet – it is normally just a matter of clicking on the app, or dragging it up to your browser toolbar to install.
If you go to https://hootsuite.com/app-directory you can see a list of most of the applications that HootSuite supports, and the list is growing all the time. But for now, we will just be concentrating on the major platforms.
Sign in to HootSuite on all devices, and they will all be synchronized automatically.
This is a sample taken from a chapter in the book, The Big Social Media Book.
Click here to read the full chapter and pick up your copy.
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