Social Media Tips And Tools From The Top – Part 2
Welcome back to our selection of the best tools and tips to get your social medial activity performing as well as it can. In part 1 we looked at tools that you can use to take raw text or data to infographics, image posts and video.
We're going to start with bit.ly, a service that started out as a way of shortening links when Twitter still had a 140 character limit on tweets. If users wanted to share a URL they had to trim their tweet text right down to stay within that limit, so using a bit.ly shortened link gave users more room to say what they wanted, uncensored. Bit.ly is still useful for shortening links, especially ones which have tracking incorporated to allow website owners to see which visitors are arriving from a certain promoted link. Bit.ly also provides its own tracking which, for the novice business owner, can be a great way of tracking and understanding customer activity.Many businesses use Google Analytics to track website activity, but it can be confusing if you're just starting out. Bit.ly makes it easy for you to start analysing your website traffic, without having to add GA tracking code to your site.We'd recommend using GA or a similar tool for full analytics projects, but to start out with Bit.ly is a great introduction.
If you're not sure about which social channel to use, the only way to find out which is the best for you and your business is to test a few out and see what happens. This means setting up accounts on the major players and often people are put off by this, as they think it means spending ages writing and posting the same message across multiple platforms. CoSchedule, Sendible and Buffer are all tools which allow you to post on all your accounts from a single dashboard.Each has their own specific features, but they're all ways of managing your social media activity easily and quickly. There is a small amount of set-up involved to link your accounts to the service, but once that is done you'll be saving at least 8 hours a month (on an average social media schedule) by using one of these centralised services. Once you're comfortable with these streamlining services you might start to look at similar tools that collate your social media metrics from all platforms.
One of the most important aspects of social media marketing is commitment. If you're testing the waters on social media by using one of the post scheduling tools above you'll soon find out which are the best platforms for your business, so ensure that you commit to staying active and responsive on those channels.
Finally, you are one of the tools that can be leveraged for greater reach on social media.We always say that positioning yourself as a topic or industry leader creates a good reputation which can also bolster your business; so make sure you put yourself out there through a blog or your own, personal social channel that you can promote through your business accounts. Your customers want to hear from you, and get your insights and thoughts on the hot topics in your industry. A blog is a great way of ensuring you have fresh, regular content on your website but it's also a vehicle for communicating your take on things and promoting yourself and your business as industry experts.
If this all seems like it's outside your skill-set or you don't have the time, we can create, implement and monitor social media activity for you, leaving your time free for your area of expertise while we focus on ours.
