How to Monitor Your Social Media Campaigns in 30 Minutes or Less

A Little Time Takes You a Long Way
Social media monitoring as part of your marketing mix has never been more important. And it’s not going away. The sooner you realize your brand needs to be in this arena, the better off you’re going to be.
As with all your marketing efforts, you’ll first need a plan. Carve out as little as 30 minutes a day to accomplish social media tasks.
Here are our recommendations to make your social media monitoring quick and painless.
1. Determine Where Your Brand Should Be
There are lots of networks, some more appropriate for your business than others. Once you choose where you need to be, make sure you set up your profiles consistently. Include consistent branding, links to your company website and a short, general overview of your product or service.
2. Engage, Engage, Engage
Your brand needs to remain active on all your networks. This includes providing news updates, responding to questions or concerns about your company and your industry in general, offering feedback, giving praise for positive comments, and immediately handling anything negative that you find. Never let a negative comment go unanswered.
3. Monitor Both Your Brand and Your Competition
You need to know what your competitors are doing and what their customers are saying. This is your chance to capitalize on negative comments lodged against your competition. But do so in a human way. Social media followers respect open, honest communication. Brand-speak is generally frowned upon. Just be yourself while being true to your brand.
4. Twenty Minutes is All it Takes
Break up monitoring of your four primary networks into 5-minute segments each day. Facebook and Twitter will likely be on your list. Take 5 minutes to scan your Facebook wall, providing thoughtful comment and feedback. Take another 5 minutes to review and respond to pertinent Tweets about you and your competitors. Then split the remaining 10 minutes between your next most important networks. Monitoring your online presence can be done in as little as 20 minutes a day. But do this every day of the week.
5. Ten Minutes More Keeps You on Top
For our clients with limited internal resources and small budgets who choose to handle social media monitoring internally, we recommend spending an additional 10 minutes to review RSS feeds and pertinent blog posts. Staying on top of how you’re being talked about online is critical to your brand’s social game.
Choose Your Partners Carefully
For those brands needing more direction, there are hundreds of groups, including Grey Matter, that provide additional strategy and complete community management. When selecting an external vendor to manage your brand socially, make sure you find one that truly understands your brand. There’s nothing worse than paying an agency to run your social game into the ground.
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