11/26/2014
So, you’re finally ready to take your digital marketing efforts to the next level. And for the last 5 years all you’ve been hearing about is how that other company went from having 72 facebook fans to becoming the next hot business featured in Entrepreur magazine – all because they grew their social media presence. You know that your own social media marketing has been something you’ve been putting off, but now it’s time to really push.
For many business and marketing managers, creating a real presence in the online space is a daunting task, and the idea of spending 3 hours of your busy day tweeting just doesn’t make sense. The good news is that there are a number of tools to help you save time when trying to manage all of your social media profiles. Dashboards like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck allow you to post to multiple profiles at once. But there are also drawbacks to using these dashboards. So what’s best for you and your business? Here’s the scoop.
The Good
The idea creating one post and blasting it to all of your social profiles from appeals to a lot of marketing managers who want to spead their reach. With dashboards like the popular Hootsuite and Buffer, you get that and more. You can also schedule your content to be deployed ahead of time, so you don’t have to wait by the computer to seize the best time to post. And depending on the dashboard, other neat tools also allow you to do things like set up RSS feed-to-post integrations so that a new social post goes out every time you create a new blog post. And most dashboards give you deeper analyitics so you can have a better undersatnding of which posts work and which ones don’t. Sounds like the silver bullet to solve all of your marketing problems, right? Well, maybe not.
The Bad
Though social media management dashboards like this sound like a slam dunk, they may not be the best solution for your business. Depending on the social network, the content may not feed to your profile in the way you imagine. For example, if you add an image to your post via the dashboard, it may not actually display as an image but, instead, a link to an image – therefore giving impatient users another step to go through to get to your content.
Also, in the case of Hootsuite, the analytics for likes, shares, and comments are not included in your Facebook Insights. Hootsuite has it’s own way of reporting stats, but if you want to look in Facebook’s analytics to see how how your Hootsuite posts perform, you’re out of luck.
But lastly, as good as it seems to be able to blast the same message all over the web, it may not be the most effective way to market to your potential customers. Each social platform has a different core audience, so your marketing messages will often need to be styled to speak to them in their own unique way.
The Finish
Before you jump into filling up the internet with your brand’s social content, take a moment to come up with a small strategy to get the most out of each platform. For your brand’s audience, you may be able to get by using a one-size-fits-all dashboard. But if you want to really leverage all of the power of each individual social networks, make sure your posts are specifically optimized for each platform. Make sure your text, images, and links all follow the rules of each specific network. There’s no shortcut for this. But if you market effectively, there are also no limits on how powerful your marketing can become. If you really want a return on your time, you have to make the right moves up front.
