When is it OK to Delegate and Automate in Social Media?

December 20, 2009 By 5 Comments

QmarkI don’t think I would be anywhere near as productive as I am in social media today without having tools, systems and processes to monitor and organize my expanding network. They really have been the secret to my success, and of my clients’ success.  In the work that I do in social media, time management and feeling overwhelmed are always the biggest concerns that I hear—but they don’t have to be.

A Careful Balance

Automation is all about leveraging your time and energy, but often you will hear people say that this goes against the whole idea of social media being about building and nurturing relationships. However, there are ways to automate some of your social media efforts—without detracting from cultivating your authentic voice and personality when it comes to your online presence.

Identifying valuable resources, like blog posts, websites or quotes that you believe would be helpful or valuable to your Twitter followers and pre-scheduling sharing this content would be one example. The nature of tweets like these is that they are essentially one-way communication and don’t depend on you being available when they are posted in order to field some kind of “real time” response. Therefore, this kind of content is ideal for pre-scheduling in advance. A tool like Hootsuite is great for easily setting these kinds of updates up.

Keep Your Voice

The most common way to delegate in social media is via a virtual assistant, but it’s important to note that it’s not recommended that you delegate anything that contains your personality or voice. A specific example of an ideal task to delegate would be having someone track and monitor your reputation and brand via search.twitter.com or the search feature on Facebook.

When thinking about delegation, stick to housekeeping, administrative or organizational tasks not related to the conversation—for example, approving Facebook friend requests with an established criteria or using criteria to find more people to follow on Twitter. Other tasks would be to do the initial research on ideal people on Facebook to send friend requests to, pre-scheduling tweets as mentioned earlier, creating events in Facebook, researching quality blogs, sites and links that contain good content for you to share via tweets and Facebook updates, managing your Facebook inbox, adding new business-related applications to your Fan Page and more.

Don’t Get Stuck

One of the biggest mistakes that people make—especially those who are new to social media—is that they start to get stuck in a cycle of automating, broadcasting and automating—over and over. It’s very difficult to generate positive results this way. However, automating and delegating appropriate activities while still taking the time to engage in regular conversation can be the perfect blend—so that you can leverage your time and still maximize your success.

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How to Add an Opt-in Form to Your Facebook Fan Page

December 12, 2009 By 11 Comments

A few months back I recorded a tutorial on how to add an opt-in form to your personal Facebook profile in order to add email subscribers to your list. It was a popular video, but I now wanted to show how to add a form to your Facebook Fan Page, as the application and process is a little different. Here I show how to do it using the Facebook application called Static FBML. Hope it’s helpful!

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5 Marketing Mantras for Entrepreneurs

December 6, 2009 By 3 Comments

fiveAs I mentioned in a previous post, I recently attended Ali Brown’s 3-day Shine Event in Las Vegas.  Shine was a seminar all about marketing, entrepreneurship and personal development. The second day of the event was devoted to one of my fave topics—marketing.

Ali shared with us her top marketing “mantras,” and I thought they were pretty spot-on so I wanted to share them here:

1) The marketing is more important than the mastery. I first heard this from Ali a few years back, and I recently wrote an article on this very topic. It doesn’t mean that what you do in your business isn’t important, it just means that mastering marketing is just as important mastering your craft. You can be great at what it is you do—but if you are not marketing consistently, your skills and abilities won’t be enough to keep your business afloat.

2) Always be marketing. Marketing your business is necessary all of the time—not just when your revenues are down or the economy is bad. Unfortunately, many business owners are learning this lesson now in the recession. Their bottom line is suffering because in the past, they never thought they really “needed” to market.

3) Emphasize benefits over features. When you market your services or products, think of benefits as being what answers the customer’s question of “what’s in it for me?”

4) Be original, but clear. Adding your own personal flair to your marketing can help you stand out among the crowd, but make sure the message of what it is you can do for people doesn’t get lost in your quest to be unique or memorable.

5) Work your best methods. There are countless ways to market a business, both online and off: books, blogs, press releases, live events, advertising, direct mail, giveaways…and on and on. You don’t have to pick just one method, nor do you need to be doing a little of everything. As it was described at Ali’s event, “marketing’s a buffet.” Choose a handful that work for you and work them continually.

So, what does marketing come down to? Marketing is really just communication and relationship building. Your job is to use that communication to accomplish four main things:

1. Attract leads
2. Collect leads
3. Follow up
4. Close the sale

Sometimes business owners make marketing more complicated than it actually needs to be. Follow these five mantras and you’ll go a long way toward simplifying the path to closing that all-important sale.

Filed Under: Small Business Marketing Tagged With: