by Kimberly | Jan 8, 2017 | Blog, small business, Social Media, social media marketing, Social Media Virtual Assistant
As a small business owner or entrepreneur, you probably know that it’s a good idea to get started using social media but may be wondering where and how to get started. In this article, I’ll be going four steps that will help you establish your business with a social media presence and get a good, solid start reaching your target market, creating a community and engaging with your customers. It’s important to plan out how you want to approach social media to ensure that your efforts are efficient and effective. STEP 1: Goals, Branding and Target Audience Your business has goals and your social plan should too. It’s also a good idea to identify your branding objectives to help guide you in creating your social media plan. Tie your branding objectives to your business goals. If your goal is to gain more customers, then one of your social media goals would be to increase your visibility (let people know you exist). Another goal would be to use social media to engage with your customers to give them a sense of who you are, what you do and what your business offers. Your social media presence will be a reflection of your business so it’s important to think about the tone you want to use for your social media posts, the images you use and the ad campaigns that you run. These will be the parts of your social media presence that will leave an impression with your audience so you want to have some planning and strategy behind. Your social media channels should also work together with your other...
by Kimberly | Aug 10, 2010 | Blog, Featured, How to, Social Media, social media marketing, Twitter
There are several different options available to help you manage multiple social media accounts at once. Among the most popular are Tweetdeck, Seesmic and Hootsuite. Depending on your needs and desire for access, then you might consider each one of these for different reasons. All of them have a web version and apps for iPhone. Tweetdeck and Seesmic also have downloadable desktop versions. For everyday non-mobile use, I have found Hootsuite to be my preferred social media management tool. Hootsuite provides you with a comprehensive social media dashboard for managing multiple social media accounts and platforms all in once place. First built as a Twitter management tool, Hootsuite has grown to include the ability to post to LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook pages, Ping.fm, MySpace, WordPress, Foursquare and importing RSS feeds. With Hootsuite, you can pull in multiple Twitter accounts, multiple Facebook profiles, multiple LinkedIn accounts, etc. For Twitter accounts, you can quickly and easily view your Home Feed, your @ mentions, your sent tweets, your direct messages, plus add columns for any of your Twitter lists, columns to monitor keywords or key phrases, and a pending tweets column for any scheduled tweets. You can have up to 10 columns for each twitter account showing at one time. I typically add a few columns for monitoring keywords and a few more columns for lists of specific twitterers for different purposes. For example, I might like to keep up on the tweets of my colleagues, social media people and local friends. Hootsuite makes it easy to reply, re-tweet, send a direct message, add a tweet as a favorite, reply all (for tweets...
