By Alexandra Reid
Outsourcing community management is a cost-effective way for companies to run successful social media programs even if they don’t have the internal social media resources to support such activities on their own.
Sometimes a company’s marketing department is in the midst of developing internal resources and engages with a third-party community manager to provide strategic and practical guidance to help them get their footing before taking over social media activities later on.
Other times, a company is too small or new to have its own marketing department, but realizes the benefits of social media as a relatively inexpensive marketing program. It hires an experienced, external community manager to run its program, saving the cost-heavy training and trial-and-error activities required to learn the platforms on its own.
Here at Francis Moran and Associates, I am responsible for developing social media strategies and also, if clients require, carrying out those strategies on their behalf. I’ve done this for large enterprises based right here in Ottawa as well as tiny startups located as far away as the U.K. Regardless of how much space there is between agency and client, the processes required to carry out successful outsourced social media activities are the same.
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By Alexandra Reid
As a regular weekly feature, we are going to provide our readers with a round-up of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are CIRA, Globe and Mail, Financial Post, Next Montreal and MarketingSherpa.
CIRA2012 Factbook
This Factbook, published by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (and written by our own Francis Moran), provides a fascinating overview of the domain name industry both globally and here in Canada.
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By Alexandra Reid
Facebook has announced that it will roll out new brand pages on March 30. However, businesses and organizations already active on Facebook can take the tour and publish their new pages now. This presents an opportunity for social media marketers to prepare content for new pages according to new features and specifications prior to the mandatory upgrade.
The layout of Facebook’s new pages is different from the current one in a number of ways and page users who have not prepared their content for the new format may see their once beautiful pages butchered. Please do yourself a favour and take the necessary steps outlined in this post to ensure your page and content strategy are perfect before the deadline. If you need a kick in the butt to get you moving, turn on your preview for the new page design by clicking the green button at the top of your page to see the horror of what an ill-prepared page looks like.
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By Alexandra Reid
In my last post, I shared and reviewed my favourite (free) social media monitoring tools that I use regularly to carry out social media marketing strategies on behalf of clients. Today, I reveal the management and measurement tools I use to organize and keep track of the zillions of conversations I monitor daily across multiple channels.
To summarize, these tools are free and therefore great for small businesses and new ventures. However, they are useless if they are not aligned with a sound social media marketing strategy. They are also far from perfect so we must always cross-examine data with information provided by other tools and sometimes even check information manually to ensure everything is accurate.
I decided to combine my favourite management and measurement tools because many of them do both functions. Technically, some of these can be used for monitoring social media as well. At the end of the day, it’s not so much the tools that matter, but how you use them. These are the ones that I’ve found excel, particularly in the management and measurement departments.
Without further ado, here are my favourite social media management and measurement tools:
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By Alexandra Reid
I talk a lot about social media marketing strategy here, but rarely do I mention the time-and-money-saving tools that streamline my community building activities and make our social media marketing program an effective solution for businesses.
All of the tools I use are free and available to anyone with access to a computer. They are great for small and new businesses with tight budgets and limited time for experimentation and operation. But while I highly recommend that these tools be used to support social media marketing activities, they are useless for businesses that don’t align them with a sound social media marketing strategy. Additionally, while these tools help abridge the flow of social media content so users can siphon relevant information, engage with their communities and track progress, a key challenge cited by numerous businesses is keeping on top of monitoring, measurement and engagement efforts.
We must also remember that these tools are free and far from perfect. In fact, the biggest criticisms of all social media monitoring tools (free and paid) are that they sometimes fail to provide reliable and accurate data, have lag times, bugs, and are confusing to use. That’s why we must always cross-examine data with information provided by other tools and sometimes even check information manually to ensure everything is accurate.
Today I’ll discuss the tools I use for monitoring social media. In a subsequent post, I’ll reveal my favourite management and measurement tools. You’ll notice that I don’t use many tools to do my job. This is because too many tools act as speed bumps in an otherwise efficient engagement system.
Without further ado, here are my favourite social media monitoring tools:
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By Alexandra Reid
