Measuring Social Media ROI in Real Life

The other day, someone impressed the heck out of me by doing something that few businesses do well: he asked how I heard about his company. This is an essential piece of the social media strategy puzzle, especially for brick-and-mortar businesses, and often a missing piece. When a retail client asks me how their social media strategy is doing, my response is usually, "Well, you tell me?" I can track and report from my end what kind of reach and engagement their posts are getting, but success for them is most often measured by an increase of foot traffic and physical sales. If businesses aren't asking customers where they are coming from, they will never know if their social media efforts are paying off.

"But won't that seem weird?" No one is going to be put off by being asked how they found you. (Well, there are always exceptions, but they are few and far between!) If someone is browsing your small retail store, a simple "Hey, welcome in! How did you hear about us?" can work wonders. Another thing to keep in mind is that you don't have to wait to ask them until you close a transaction. But if chatting them up is out of place, your point-of-sale system may give you a short survey option for them to fill out as they're checking out.

To make this process worthwhile, make it more than just anecdotal evidence. Create a way to track it systematically, whether it's a spreadsheet, a physical piece of paper, or a relationship management software.

If it's overwhelming for you or your staff to work this type of tracking into your everyday business routine, simplify it. Try it once a week or once a month. Something is better than nothing, so even an occasional snapshot will give you an idea of how effective your social media efforts are.

This post is an extension of a quote I gave to fellow Social Media Today contributor Steve Rayson for his post about social analytics. Kudos to Steve for getting my creative juices flowing on this topic.

As always, if you have questions on social media best practices, I'd love to hear them. Please get in touch via my website.

Need Help Updating Your LinkedIn Profile?

As a businessperson, you might have heard that LinkedIn is important if you're looking for a new job. LinkedIn is also an essential to build your personal brand in your current position! You can use LinkedIn as your online resume and as a professional networking tool to post updates, articles and photos, just like you would on a Facebook Page or Profile. You can also receive testimonials (called LinkedIn Recommendations) from your LinkedIn contacts for work you've done in the past and in your current position.

If you need help updating your LinkedIn profile, learning how to post updates, and managing LinkedIn Recommendations, I am available for hourly consulting. Here's a LinkedIn Recommendation I received for this type of work from a recent client:

"Lauren was a great help in helping me update my LinkedIn profile. I was able to add 10 new testimonials to my profile. 

What she accomplished in 30 minutes what it would have taken me days. She is extremely knowledgeable and a great resource that I would highly recommend." - Brad Hunt, American Pacific Mortgage 

If you need hourly consultation to clean up your LinkedIn profile, please contact me via my website.

Happy networking!

Yes, You Can Hire Someone to Manage Your Twitter Account

When people ask what exactly a social media manager does and I explain it to them, one of the most common responses I get is: "You mean I can hire someone to tweet for me?" Yes, you can! "But how do you know what to say?"

A good social media manager is a chameleon. To determine what to tweet on their behalf, I soak up all the details of my client's business and create a custom content strategy. I then develop their voice and tone down to the smallest detail. Are their hashtags practical or whimsical? Would they use periods at the end of sentences or ellipses? Do they use contractions? What about slang? When you only have 140 characters to work with, these tiny elements make a big difference. They are what creates authenticity and prevents tweets from sounding corporate or canned.

Managing a Twitter account for a brand also means curating and developing their online community. Retweets, follows and favorites further express the brand's identity and help it connect with the right customers, partners and prospects. I once took over a local business' Twitter account and discovered that the agency who theyd worked with previously had followed nearly 2,000 Twitter accounts of peope all across the country, in an effort to build their community. The problem was, a vast majority of those people would never visit the city the business was in, let alone shop there. A good social media manager will develop a Twitter community that is relevant to your business.

One of the most important things that a social media manager provides on Twitter is a high and consistent volume of posts. If you're posting only once a day, no one is seeing your messages. Opinions differ on exactly how many posts per day is effective, but no matter what your goal total is, boosting the volume of posts gives you more opportunities to be heard throughout the day.

Long story short, it is entirely possible (and highly recommended!) to find someone to tweet for you instead of trying to do it yourself. Hiring someone to manage your Twitter account will give you a more consistent, engaged, effective presence and free up your time to focus on the work of your business.

Social Media Management from Afar

Whether you're a traveling or representing clients in another part of the country or the world, there are three key things to keep in mind when managing social media from afar:

1. Time Zone: Make sure you're posting at the best times for the fans.
2. Local Voice: If appropriate, adapt the tone of your content to sound familiar to local fans.
3. Local Content Sources: Source content locally to make it more relevant.

For more details on why, visit my original guest post on Social Media Club's "From the Clubhouse" blog. 

What is a Social Media Manager?

It's the standard American conversation starter, besides discussing the weather: "What do you do?" When I tell people I'm a Social Media Manager, they nod appreciatively. Then, more often than not, they furrow their brows and ask something along the lines of: "So what exactly do you do all day?" The standard short answer is that I manage Facebook Pages and other social media accounts for businesses. But of course it's a lot more than just that. When I have time, the long answer sounds something like this.

• The social media world is complicated and what might be right for one business may not be for another. Drawing from my considerable knowledge of social media best practices, I develop a unique, individually tailored social media strategy for each of my clients, using an understanding of their goals for being on social media, target demographics and brand identity.
• Just like people have Facebook Profiles, businesses can have Facebook Pages. They contain a bio of the company, including its history and anything else that it might put on its website. And just like a person can with a Profile, the company can put out status updates, including photos and links. Instead of friends, Business Pages have fans. When people "like" a Page, its status updates appear in their news feed, just like their friends' status updates. I help companies create their Pages, and I put out content on their behalf, and respond to comments on their updates and posts on their wall. Acting as the Page, I "like" other Pages, and interact with their content and post messages on their walls. Pages can also advertise on Facebook, so I create and manage those ads as well.
• On Twitter, I create and manage accounts for my clients, including developing and posting content, and following and interacting with other accounts, especially "influencers" and "thought leaders" in the client's field. I also track and respond to mentions of the client's name and relevant keywords and, if they have a physical location, respond to check-ins and reviews on sites like Yelp and Foursquare that get pushed to Twitter. Twitter has its own advertising as well, which I manage on behalf of my clients to promote their accounts. 
• Because a Google+ presence has such a great SEO benefit, I use Google+ to share similar content to Facebook and interact with other accounts by "circling" them and interacting with their content.
• If the client has video content to share, I create a YouTube account for them and use it to post videos, respond to comments, and interact with other YouTube accounts, including commenting on their content and adding their videos to the primary account's playlists.
• Reputation management in the social media world means monitoring review sites like Yelp and Citysearch, as well as location listings like Google+ Local. Since listings on these types of sites can be generated automatically or by customers, I search for new listings in addition to monitoring to existing listings, and respond to reviews as needed. 
• Pinterest is an excellent way to share clients' images and curate image collections, especially for clients with a visually compelling or physical product for sale.
• I help clients set up a LinkedIn listing for their businesses, and in some cases manage their personal LinkedIn accounts, posting information relevant to their industry and helping them manage their network of connections.
• In addition to managing the most popular social media accounts on my clients' behalf, I also closely monitor trends in the industry to determine if new social media products might be right for them.
• As they're so fond of saying over the loudspeaker at my gym, "what gets measured gets improved!" I use a variety of analytic tools to track the progress of the work I'm doing and use those insights to refine my social media strategy.

As one of my mentors, Robert Caruso, is fond of saying, social media is a marathon, not a sprint. It requires advanced training, careful planning, incredible endurance and constant adjustment to conditions on the day. Considering all of the above elements as well as the flexibility to adapt to consumer interactions and changes in the field, the answer then to "What do you do all day?" is: work - hard.

This is me - working while on vacation in the Caribbean

How to Hire Someone to Manage Your Facebook Page

So you want to hire someone to manage your Facebook page. Here's how to do it:

• Decide why you want a Facebook page - remember that social media should be more about building relationships than selling products or services. A strong, supportive and engaged Facebook following will drive more sales than a group of people who have hidden you from their news feed or "unliked" your page because you spammed them with sales pitches.
  
• Determine how much you can spend - be realistic!
  
• Research online and find a social media consultant like me (another fun term for us is "community manager") and review their social media profiles - Facebook, Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Hint: If they're not managing their profiles well, they will probably do the same (or worse!) for yours. See if they have a portfolio of past or current Facebook work.
  
• Choose a few contenders and reach out to them. Describe your needs and ask for their approach to helping you meet those needs. Make sure they have a firm foundation in basic content (status updates) as well as familiarity with extras (apps and tabs).
  
• Pick one and sit down with him or her in person, online or on the phone. Discuss your working relationship, payment plan and Facebook strategy. They should leave with a clear vision of your brand, the voice you want your Facebook postings to be in, an idea of where they will get content from (you, online, etc) and a strategy for managing your page. Some consultants will formalize this in a contract, or you can create one yourself. Make sure it is flexible enough to allow for changes in the needs and interests of your Facebook community (a.ka. don't specify postings every Tuesday and Thursday at noon, since your fans might not be as active then.)
• Let the social media consultant do their job. If you are also an admin on your page, great, but it's best to leave the posting to the professional most of the time. You can use your admin privileges to keep an eye on your Insights page and see who your audience is (Users) and how they are interacting with your page (Interactions). Keeping an eye on these statistics will show you if your consultant is doing a good job.

If you are looking for a social media consultant, I'd be happy to talk with you. You can email me at thesocialstage@gmail.com.