(image: https://www.superdream.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Social-Media.jpg alt: Social Media ROI)
**Social media is about more than watching videos of animals doing funny things, sharing your photos from Saturday night, and stalking your favourite pop-stars.**
Sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are all highly effective ways of promoting your business, and driving traffic to your website. When, you do it right. Add the term ‘marketing’ as a suffix to something – online *marketing, *tele*marketing,* direct mail *marketing* – and it suddenly makes things appear more complicated.
The truth is though; getting the maximum return on investment from (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/digital/social-media-marketing/ text: social media marketing popup: true title: Social Media Marketing) is easier than you might think.
How to manage your social media marketing
The main thing business owners and marketing departments struggle with, is managing their social media efforts. What with everything else you have to deal with on a daily basis, Tweeting often takes a back seat.
Maintaining multiple accounts is the main challenge for marketers.
If you have a Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ to post on daily, time can easily run away with you. Before you know it, 3 hours have passed and all you have to show for it are a few tweets.
But once you know how to properly manage social media, it becomes easier than ever. And luckily for you, there are a number of web-based dashboards that make social media management and monitoring a piece of cake.
(link: http://hootsuite.com text: HootSuite) and (link: http://www.tweetdeck.com/ text: Tweetdeck) are two of the most popular social media management dashboards around.
The simple interface supports multiple platforms, allowing you to integrate your Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and more social media accounts into a single screen. This saves you time when it comes to posing across all your social networking sites.
You can track your received tweets, private messages, and even track hashtags and specific keywords – all in easy to read columns. If you have multiple social media accounts for your business, social media management software like HootSuite, makes it hassle free.
The best thing about these applications is that you can access them from any PC, and even on your smart phone via the app. This gives you the freedom to access the dashboard from anywhere, and easily update your accounts.
Easy automation tools
If all this sounds pretty complicated, and you’re still not sure you’re getting the biggest ROI; all is not lost.
In fact if you’re really short on time, there are a number of tools that will automate your social media efforts.
HootSuite for instance, enables you to schedule posts for any date and time in the future. Simply upload an Excel file with all your posts and the dates you want them to go live, and the dashboard will do the rest. You can also use the ‘auto schedule’ feature which fires out messages when your followers and fans are most active. This will ensure maximum reach – and ROI – for very little effort.
(link: https://ifttt.com/ text: If This Then That (ifttt)) is another comprehensive automation tool.
This really user-friendly web application makes social media marketing simple. By creating a number of recipes, you can automate your efforts so that every time one thing happens, something else does. For instance:
“If…I upload a blog post…Then…post to Facebook and Twitter”
See? If *THIS *then *THAT.* There are loads of options open to you with pre-written recipes, but you can also upload your own. By using ifttt, you’ll never have to remember to update your social media again.
Social media is such a powerful tool for your business marketing; and getting the biggest bang for your buck is easier than you might think. With professional management, automation, and a little commitment; social media marketing is the missing link in your marketing mix.