In honor of Community Manager Appreciation Day, Social Fresh created this AWESOME Infographic! I would like to take this moment to wish all the Community Managers a great day and kudos for the great jobs you do (most of the time unseen great jobs you do) keeping the communities you mange afloat!
What do you love MOST about being a Community Manager?
HootSuite - Social Media Dashboard
Another program that lets you update all your social media networks at once is called yoono. This is a program that can be added to your Firefox browser as an add-on tool. You can automatically view and update your social networks with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo and others. It does not have as many networks available as Social Oomph and ping.fm but it looks promising as they plan to add more social media networks eventually.
Gizapage is another promising aggregator. It says it’s an integrated social hub bringing together your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and more so that you can share with all networks at the same time, and you can pick and choose which networks too. It also lets you view your full profile from one spot. The problem with it is that you have to ask for a quote. It looks really great but that automatically makes me think it will be expensive. I put in for a quote but haven’t heard anything yet.
Social aggregators aren’t new, they’ve been around as long as social media has been around. If you do a Google search on social media aggregators you’re likely to find a lot of them both working and defunct. You’ll find free aggregators, and premium fee based services. They come and go so choose a popular one that is widely used so that you don’t have to start over. Part of using an aggregator is to save time. Setting one up takes some time and work but is worth it in the end so no matter which one you choose definitely make sure you do choose one in order to stop wasting time duplicating tasks.
photo credit: wiltonlibrary.org
Saving time on social media is imperative if you want to escape time wasters and time suckers. By setting up a system you can avoid many of the distracting games, gossip, and out and out worthless parts of social media. There is a time to play games, but it’s not while you’re at work. Even though you don’t have a boss looking over your head, the time wasting will catch up with you if you don’t get a handle on it.
Plan for Success — If you have no road map to your destination you’re not likely to make it. Sure, sometimes people accidentally hit the lottery, but most of the time success comes from careful and thoughtful planning. Don’t set out blindly for a hit or miss effort. Instead, make a plan and stick to it, adjusting as necessary.
Implement Automation — Social media automation is a great way to save time. There is no good reason why you should not schedule automatically new posts, new articles and new information across all your social media. There are many tools available that do a great job. This will enable you to use your social media time more wisely in conversation with your potential clients rather than just pushing information to them.
Schedule your time — If you set up automation you can then carefully schedule your time for using social media for being, social. Imagine that! The automation of updating friends and followers of blog posts will create time for you to actually read other people’s tweets, re-tweet good information, and to actually participate. The trick is to schedule the time, and stick to the schedule.
Outsource — Yes, you can outsource a lot of aspects of social media. A virtual assistant can set up all your automation. He/She can also keep track of your metrics, and alert you to important tweets or buzz that you need to address in a blog post or in a direct message to someone. A good long term virtual assistant can even answer your direct messages for you when needed.
Turn it off — You read that right. When you’re off work, turn off your business social media. When you are doing other work, turn off your social media completely. There is no reason to have it on 24/7 because that will only serve to distract you from money making tasks. There are better ways to monitor social media with automation and RSS feeds.
With proper planning, implementation and perseverance your social media efforts can and will pay off to bring you more traffic, more business, and more success than you ever thought possible. The important thing to learn is to control your time since that is your most important asset. If you can do something else that earns you more money, do that instead, while using tools that let you continue with using social media strategically.
If you’ve been online for any length of time, you’ve surely heard that you must include social media in your marketing efforts. In fact, from LinkedIn to Facebook to Twitter to MySpace to Flickr, social media sharing sites offer great
opportunities for entrepreneurs to reach their audiences. But many professionals aren’t fully leveraging the power of social media and may be missing out on a lot of potential new customers. Here are some highly effective out-of-the-box ways to use social media that will help you find people who need and want what you have to offer:
Chances are, you are already active on several online social media sites, though you may not have gotten the results you were hoping for. The key is to approach them a little differently. If you’re a specialist in natural health on LinkedIn, think about where you could find some of “your” people. Could they be tucked away in groups for chiropractors, naturopaths, aromatherapists, ayurvedic practitioners or whatever your target audience might be? Think outside the box, and you’ll get a lot more out of your social media activities.
SOPA breaks our internet freedom!
Any site can be shut down whether or not we've done anything wrong.
Stop SOPA!