26 Oct I’m too busy to use social media and can’t afford to pay anyone!

Marketing disciplines often fall into the ‘we’ll get to it’ filing tray, along with training, staff incentives and sprucing up the office! When times are hard, or even when times are busy, companies seem to wipe processes off the board they feel are not necessary at the time, or, by not being there can add to the bottom line.

It is a tendency most of us can relate to, I know I can in past circumstances, although we keep on falling into the same trap.
Marketing, training and looking after staff are investments and it’s important to look at them in this light rather than on a pure cost level.

Social media is a route to market and consequentially falls under the marketing category. Ever more so now, it is an essential part of any company marketing mix, however, businesses also need to invest time into learning or training best practice in order to gain the most out of the medium.

People often say to me ‘I don’t have time to do it’ or ‘I wouldn’t know where to start’. Well yes, time is required although if you spend a little more focused time at the beginning, building third party applications into your social networking activity and guarantee relevant, juicy content flows through your timeline, then, realistically you only need to invest an hour or so a day monitoring keywords for potential prospects and engaging in conversations.

By utilising RSS functionality, offered by applications such as Hootsuite or Twitterfeed, relevant, informative content can be set up to post automatically from your social media profile feeds as regularly as every hour. Of course you cannot rely solely on this activity because your fans and followers will want to engage with a real person but, if researched effectively before you start, it secures interest.

Be sure to use the hashtag symbol for searches and trending topics and regularly change and add pre and post characters to the automated posts to boost your visibility.

By preparing automated content in this way, you attract interest and only need to focus on the one to one conversations. Set up some keywords based around your company products and services, brands, and demographic sectors.
Now all you need to do is have a look and see who’s talking about problems you have the solutions for and make that connection.

Happy tweeting 🙂