DASHBOARDS AND LINKED ACCOUNTS SOCIAL-MEDIA
PUBLISHING MADE EASIER
With the rapid increase in social-media Web sites, businesses and ordi-
nary people alike can now easily become fatigued and spread too thin.
They ’ re on too many platforms to post to any of them with regularity. One
step the major social platforms are now making is integration between one
another: link your Facebook account to your Twitter account, and your
Facebook posts will appear automatically, abbreviated to 140 characters if
need be, on Twitter.
Link Twitter to LinkedIn and your tweets automatically appear as status
updates on LinkedIn.
The advantage of account linking is clear: it ’ s fast and convenient. Time
spent managing your social-media program at its most elemental level—
writing and publishing your posts—is cut to a fraction.
The problem is that managing your program at this most elemental level
is important. Each of the social platforms is its own beast with its own
culture. Your networks on each platform will overlap, no doubt, but they ’ ll
also contain a lot of different people who come to each platform with dif-
ferent expectations.
A typical Facebook wall post is a longer, more leisurely post than is pos-
sible on Twitter; often on Facebook your posts will be illustrated with an
image. On Twitter, the 140-character limit imposes a disciplined “haiku”
style post, getting across a main point and the author ’ s emotional perspec-
tive in a bare minimum of words and abbreviations.
When your Facebook posts are fed automatically to Twitter, often all
that appears will be fl uff, with the most crucial content chopped off abruptly
and a random “short URL” link stuck in its place.
You may forget your Twitter account is hooked to LinkedIn, and publish
breezy, trivial, or unprofessional tweets that send an awkward message on
your more business-minded LinkedIn account. Do you really want your cli-
ents, vendors, colleagues, and business prospects to know that you ’ re listen-
ing to Bob Marley in your bare feet while fi nishing that big proposal?
More important, perhaps, is that being on these platforms is an impor-
tant part of, well, being on the platforms—seeing the status posts of your
fans and those you follow scroll by. Seeing what topics are trending on
Twitter. Seeing which of your business contacts are traveling to an impor-
tant conference or publishing new blog posts on a topic of interest to you.
Remember, we ’ re on the social networks to be social—to perk up our
ears to ongoing conversations, to read the posts of others and comment in
an encouraging and constructive way, to build relationships, and to receive
and answer customer inquiries, praise, or complaints as fast as possible. If
you overuse the new tools for the sake of effi ciency, but as a consequence
fail to log into each account and become an authentic member of the online
community there, you ’ ll have been penny-wise but pound-foolish.
My advice to anyone starting a program is to leave accounts unlinked
for at least the fi rst six months or year of your social-media endeavors.
That way you ’ ll establish a real community consisting of genuine, per-
sonal connections. You ’ ll understand the unique culture of each platform
and how to be more effective in each one.
When you do link accounts, do it sparingly and only temporarily. You
should only share posts that are “for everybody” and feel like they work
equally well everywhere. When you ’ re done sharing those posts, unlink
your accounts so you don ’ t forget about the linkage in the future and share
an inappropriate comment across multiple networks.
One excellent solution is to use a social media dashboard like HootSuite
to make your publishing easier—without sacrifi cing the quality of your
posts to each network. HootSuite and other dashboards integrate with
social networks like Twitter or Facebook to make publishing easier and
add some powerful scheduling, monitoring, and tracking tools. On Hoot-
Suite, you can:
• Manage several different Twitter accounts from one publishing
platform.
• Publish to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn from one platform.
• Queue and schedule social-media posts ahead of time—for the entire
upcoming week, say.
• Manage workfl ow among the members of your social-media team.
• Monitor what ’ s being said by others about your brand or products.
• Get statistical reports of how your program is performing.
CUSTOMER RATINGS AND REVIEWS
If you have a product to sell, the social networks can seem a very round-
about way to pursue your main goal. You don ’ t generate a lot of editorial
content and maybe you don ’ t have an overriding social mission. You just
want to encourage people to buy! Well, user ratings and reviews are for
you.
Pioneered almost from its very start by Amazon.com , user reviews and
ratings are an incredibly powerful tool. Today, if you want them on your
site—and syndicated to the Web at large—you don ’ t have to pour into the
effort the millions of bucks Amazon did. Many e-commerce platforms
have now built the feature into their software. If yours has not, the quickest
and easiest approach may be a third-party service, the two most notable
being PowerReviews and Bazaarvoice.
Both work roughly the same: users review your product qualitatively and
give it an overall one-to-fi ve star rating that will be displayed on the product
detail page. Your product page will invite visitors to review the product.
Best practices are also to solicit product feedback via e-mail when you send
customers their order confi rmation and shipping confi rmation e-mails.
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