by Corrie Davidson, Sisarina, @corrietweets
As a social media strategist and manager, I work with a lot of social media accounts. In addition to running my own, I also run those of clients. I provide training and help small businesses get their presences on various social platforms up to speed - meaning a lot of monitoring and minor-crisis management. This means I have to stay organized. I have to be able to monitor and respond through multiple accounts at a moment's notice. Clients ask me all the time: "How do you do it??"
How do you manage multiple social media accounts all the time?
It definitely takes the ability to multi-task, and you have to have a passion for the medium. I genuinely care about each of my clients and am always on the lookout for new opportunities for them. But planning my time keeps me sane, and having the right tools is what enables me to be everywhere all the time.
1. Scheduling.
Every client, platform, and audience is different. You cannot take a cookie-cutter approach when it comes to social networking. Different clients want to reach different demographics. Those demographics interact differently on different platforms, at different times, and on different days of the week. (Do you sense a theme here?) When a client budgets a certain amount of hours a week, I need to make sure those hours are utilized in the most effective way possible.
For example, I have a client in the home improvement industry who sees the most Facebook fan interaction on tuesdays and on the weekends and the most Twitter interaction on tuesdays and fridays. We still produce content all week, but I make sure to allot a healthy dose of time to monitoring and interacting with fans on those days.
2. Tools.
There are a number of third-party applications that improve your social media management experience. I used both Tweetdeck and CoTweet, but eventually settled on Hootsuite because it worked best for my needs and workflow. Hootsuite allows me not only to monitor and post to multiple accounts on multiple platforms (including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, WordPress, MySpace, foursquare, and mixi), but also to schedule when I want those posts to go out. While I never advocate automating your replies or social media presence, being able to schedule messages ahead of time is incredibly helpful.
For example, I had a client in the luxury automobile industry who was promoting an event they were sponsoring. Knowing we wanted to post about the event every couple of days, I pre-wrote a number of tweets using the language and hashtag for the event and scheduled them to go out at different times, every few days for several weeks (i.e. monday morning, wednesday afternoon, and saturday evening). I could then focus my attention on real time conversations as they occurred rather than having to remember when to periodically post about the event and how to space it out.
I hope these "tricks of the trade" will help you tackle your company's social media presence in an effective and less-overwhelming way.
If you have any questions or need any help with your social networking presence, just leave a comment or send us a message - we are always happy to help! :)
