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A Guide for Choosing Social Media Management Tools and Services
The Sprocket Report
While we can all agree that social media marketing is important to every business, the return on investment for individual industries varies and the “investment” itself ranges from free to thousands of dollars a month. So how does the smaller business owner figure it all out?
The first step, as always, is to decide on your social media goals. A basic presence to support your website may be enough. Setting up a Facebook page and posting once a week won’t drive people to your door, but it at least proves you’re a real business when folks are searching online for someone in your industry.
If your goal is to spread information or to grow your audience, you’ll need to spend more time and/or money on creating content and engaging with people. You won’t be surprised to hear that it’s easier for some industries to generate buzz than it is for others. For instance, growing an active Facebook page to promote ball bearings would probably not be worth the effort needed. But people get interested in tasty-looking sandwiches every single day around 11:55am so the ROI is probably pretty good.
Plenty of entrepreneurs do their own social media marketing since they often have the time in the early stage, but once business picks up, time becomes more and more scarce. Advertisements for social media management tools say they make the task easier, but before you start paying a monthly bill, know what you’re buying.
If you are active on several different platforms, tools will usually let you interact with all of them on one dashboard instead of having to log in to each one individually. So that is a time-saver. You may also be able to see each platform’s engagement report on the same dashboard. Check that the tool you choose gives you access to the platforms you want and lets you also respond to your followers’ comments.
Remember that while a tool might make it easier to post to your platforms, you still need to come up with something to post! Creating content takes exponentially more time than just scheduling posts.
Some ads say their tool or service provides “content creation.” Check out carefully what that claim means. “Industry-specific” content is a library of appropriate items they use for all of their chiropractor clients or for all of their accountant clients. That still may be a fine path toward your marketing goal, depending on your budget.
If you want personalized content, it’s obviously going to take you more time to create or you will pay more for someone else to create. We’re talking about things like photos of your event with the influencers tagged appropriately or your professional opinion on a currently trending news story.
Your website is an important part of social media marketing, of course, and some services include building a new site or at least a new landing page so that all this marketing leads customers to your virtual door. Reposting Forbes articles on your Facebook page will help engage your audience, but it mainly rewards Forbes.
Sprocket has always advised that instead of sending your readers straight to that Forbes article, send them there through a blog post on your own website. Explain why you are sharing this item to show your expertise. Of course you’ll also provide a link to the original article, but now you – not Forbes -- has the opportunity to keep them on your site little longer.
Integrating your website with your social media platforms, writing personalized posts and engaging with followers could require hiring your own social media manager. For some businesses, this is absolutely the best solution, but only you can do the appropriate return on investment math for your business.
Perhaps you need a big push only for a special event or a hybrid of services will give you enough exposure to keep the sales funnel filled. A solid knowledge of your social media marketing goals will guide how to spend your marketing budget.
If you need assistance with your social media strategy, give us a call to discuss the opportunities. We have been providing social media services for a number of years to support our clients’ websites and we’d be happy to help you, too.
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Kate Gingold
I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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