For a while now, we have been encouraging people to make more use of social media in their marketing mix, but doing this can become an administration headache when you are trying to manage multiple profiles all with slightly different target markets & user profiles. With this in mind, we thought it worth devoting a blog post to this subject, so here goes. Laying the groundwork We would always advocate that you should have a central web presence that you are 100% in control of. This is usually going to be your website, and if that website is based on our favourite (and FREE!) development platform, WordPress, then there are some great tools for publishing your posts out onto social networks. The tool we recommend is LinksAlpha, coupled with the Network Publisher WordPress plugin. This combination enables you to link your website to your social networking profiles. Every news post that you put onto your website will be automatically published to your chosen sites. This creates a good regular “bedrock” of content going out to your social media audience, and keeps your website fresh with regular new content. Naturally, you retain full control to not publish particular posts or specify a particular phrase or sentence as the basis of your Tweet etc. Building on this foundation Once you have laid this foundation, the key is to accept that Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms are different, they have different strengths and tend to be used by different audiences. The level to which this is true will depend on you specific situation, but a review of one client who is active on both Twitter & Facebook showed that less than 10% of contacts follow them on both platforms, suggesting that the two should maybe be treated separately. I am sure it is not unreasonable to extrapolate these findings to other social media platforms like LinkedIn. Once we acknowledge this, it would then seem sensible to have the flexibility to post to individual social media platforms separately, in groups or to all platforms as appropriate. And there is a great tool that gives you this flexibility. Hootsuite, is a suite of applications for PC and/or mobile, that allows you to manage your social media profiles in one place, and to post to some or all of them as appropriate. It also allows you to schedule posts, thus making the management of these account even easier. The whole structure If we pull all this together, we have a cohesive platform for delivering a manageable & sustainable social media presence that delivers regular, targeted content as efficiently as possible. Useful Links Network Publisher WordPress plugin – wordpress.org/extend/plugins/network-publisher/ Hootsuite – hootsuite.com
