By , Scott Langdon
Published May 03, 2016
No matter how small your business is, a good, strong social media strategy should be a vital part of your marketing efforts. An October 2015 study by Pew Research Center found that 65 percent of American adults surveyed use social networking sites, which means that if your business doesn't have a presence there, you're missing out on two-thirds of the U.S. population.
Related: How to Be the Taylor Swift of Your Facebook Feed
With dozens of social avenues to choose from, though, social media management may seem overwhelming, especially for a small business. Below are some tools and tips to effectively manage social media for your business, no matter how lean your team is.
Before diving in and signing up for every channel with a social aspect, get organized and be realistic about your capabilities, looking at the following categories:
Related: Stop Wasting Time, Especially When It Comes to Social Media
Now that you have a strategy in place and know what social media channels you’ll use, what type of messaging you want to disseminate and how you’re going to monitor your successes and areas for improvement, you'll next need to put your approach into action. Thankfully, social media monitoring tools save you time as you’re managing channels and evolving strategy.
Often, social media in-house analytics tools provided by social media channels, such as those outlined by Social Media Examiner, are some of the most effective ways to keep track of data. Facebook Analytics, for example, shows page managers everything from number of visitors at varying times of the day to data on how many people carried out a negative action -- such as un-liking a page -- when interacting with a specific post.
Pinterest analytics show you the type of content your users love the most, while Twitter shows you not only yours and customers' top Tweets, but impressions and engagement. Google Analytics will show you what channels are driving traffic to your website and resulting in sales. Explore the free analytics of whatever sites you’re using, and use those insights to craft better content and optimize frequency of distribution.
While you can use software such as Excel to keep track of messaging and ensure you’re creating unique content for each channel, a multi-channel management application can display multiple feeds at once, saving you the pain of logging into myriad sites and clicking multiple windows.
Free social media multi-channel management services, such as those endorsed by the experts here, include Hootsuite and Buffer; and pull networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, which can go into one easy-to-read window. Some, like Hootsuite, will even display additional data besides your channel content, such as interactions with your business from other brands.
Since social media is, well, social, you’ll want to make your strategy transparent to your team. This will not only garner you insight and suggestions from the social media users who make up your company but will incentivize them to get involved and boost your engagement by participating on your social channels.
Free project management tools such as Trello and Slack, mentioned by Social Media Today, allow you to display tasks to your team, while also allowing for global discussion.
Social media may be free, but your time is highly valuable. Continue to refine and optimize your social media strategy to maximize results, while saving your business money by taking advantage of free applications.
Related: 4 Ways To Boost Your Social Media Presence
https://www.foxnews.com/us/5-tips-on-how-to-maximize-social-media-efforts-with-a-small-team