Social media and social networking gives business owners the opportunity to reach a larger audience at a low or no cost aside from the time spent networking.

As business owners we’re always looking to find ways to maintain our social media presence as efficiently as possible whilst still allowing us time to manage our other business activities. Below are 7 time saving tips we would like to share with you that might help you save time and create an effective social media marketing plan.

1. Understand your purpose and have a plan

Before jumping into social media set aside some time to think about specifically what you hope to get out of it. Perhaps it’s to increase traffic to your website, gain brand recognition or to maintain relations with your customers. Since time is limited it’s important to know what your purpose is, how you will approach it.

2. Understand what social media is all about

It’s important to understand what social media is, learn the etiquette and the do’s and don’ts before jumping in. You don’t want to create a negative image for your brand. Take the time to get familiar with the various social media sites, connect with other users and learn how the sites work. One of the biggest mistakes is to jump into social media and start promoting your product or service right off the bat. This will tend to create the impression that you’re only interested in selling and not the conversation or the people who are following you.

3. Targeting specific sites

Another common mistake new users make is to sign up for an account on as many social media sites they can find. You’ll never be able to keep up with all of them and you’ll be spreading yourself too thin. Focus on a just a few sites and plan to be an active and consistent user. You’ll see far greater results!

4. Use Twitter

Twitter is a great way to connect with your target audience with fast and instant results if you have a product launch, event, teleclass, etc and need to market it to a large group quickly. Being active on Twitter doesn’t mean you need to create an account and follow a lot of people or send out tweets about anything and everything. Start by following people and replying to their tweets, start conversations, see who’s following them and if they fit in your target audience/niche follow them. When you have a new product/service/blog posting share it with your followers. As you make more connections and gain influence your results will improve by generating more traffic to your website or clicks to your links.

5. Target niche-specific social media sites

Niche-specific social media sites are on the increase and these sites provide a smaller community of targeted people that you can get your content to. You’ll find a higher percentage of people on these sites will fall into your target market and produce greater results.

6. Cultivate your network

Your network determines the success of your social media marketing. Get to know people in your niche, see who is promoting their content, and reach out to them about the possibility of helping each other.

7. Schedule times for social media

The best way to manage social media is to schedule a set block of time to use social media. It could be 30 minutes a day or 3 times a week. By having set times it can help you to keep your usage down and still be active. Once you decide what’s right for you stick to it!

Do you currently have social media marketing methods that you use to help you save time and still be an active member of the social media community? If so, we would love to hear what works for you!

Measuring social media success is a hot topic for most companies these days as people see the need to include social media as a part of their marketing strategy yet at the same time they are not quite sure what metrics matters when looking to measure ROI.

It is important to know what it is we want to measure before we engage. Doing so will allow us to define a strategy and plan to support activity that helps us reach our goals and objectives.

What is it we want to change, improve, accomplish, etc? Do we want to get more sales, registrations, referrals, links, reduction in costs and processes, better customer retention, lead generation, conversion, etc.

Revenue is only one form of measurement, but defining the “R” in ROI will help us get clarity on our business goals and performance indicators. Some value we should consider as a return are:

• Measurable and incremental sales – through coupon codes, cookies, etc.
• Customer Insight – feedback from customers about your brand
• Customer Satisfaction – how happy customers are with your brand, product or service
• Engagement – growth in fans/followers who receive ongoing social communication from you
• Referrals – people’s willingness to recommend your product or service to others
• Campaign Success – feedback from customers about future campaign launches that help prevent bad ones
• Filter to other marketing efforts – willingness of people to participate in your other marketing efforts such as email list, surveys, website, mobile, etc.
• Brand Awareness – value to your brand by reaching out to customers and ensuring you do better than your competitors

Are you considering using social media for your brand? Do you have a set of metrics that you use to measure performance? If so, we encourage you to share with us your pains and success stories as the measurement of Social Media ROI continues to evolve!

You’ve probably read a lot of articles that strongly recommend you have a strategy plan before jumping into the Social Media realm. Whilst having a plan is always a good thing, the truth is we still don’t know enough about social media and how people will react to be able to design an effective strategy plan.

Conversely, we should try experimenting with new, creative and interesting ways to engage with our target audience. If you are a large or well-known organization with well-established brands you should proceed with a little bit more caution with any experiments. There is a potential you could negatively impact your brand.

There is nothing carved in stone to say doing it one way is better than another. It is through experimentation that we will learn and uncover what works best for our company and brand. The old adage comes to mind, “No Risk, No Gain”!

Social media is about the moment and what everyone is talking about which makes it hard to predict and plan ahead. You need to jump into the conversation that is viral at any given time. If you have a clear and compelling brand and the discipline to maintain it across the different social media platforms, the conversation just flows naturally.

By not having a specific or rigid social media plan it also means we can be more flexible in empowering employees to engage with people through social media and act as ambassadors for our brand and product.

Companies should be engaging in some sensible experimentation to figure out whether social media is right for their business. Depending on the type of business you’re in, you might discover that your customers prefer not to do business with you in an online social environment.

Are you using Social Media for your brand? Did you have a Social Media Strategy Plan from the start or did you experiment with different things till you found the right strategy that works for you and your brand?

Twitter users come from all four corners of the globe, from different time zones and even in the US the time zone difference means when you post your tweets and how often matters if you’re trying to increase your reach.

Unlike a blog, that gets indexed by Google for future reference, tweets are greatly time-dependent. If you’re trying to reach as many followers as possible with your message, the timing and frequency of your tweets are critical to your success!

Post your most important tweets 4 times, 8-12 hours apart to increase your reach to as many followers as possible. If the goal of your tweet is to convert people to your blog or website you’re better off sending more than 1 tweet. Chances are people following you want to see content from you and you’re better off sending 2 tweets versus 1 to ensure everyone in different time zones get a chance to see it.

By analyzing the times of day during which your followers tweet you can develop a strategy to predict the percentage of your followers that you can reach with multiple tweets. Multiple tweets don’t have to take place during one day; they can be spread over several days so as not to annoy your most attentive followers.

Analyze the tendencies of your followers to see what the best strategies are for maximizing the reach of your most critical messages.

Many of us probably have more tweets coming through in any given day than we are able to keep up with. In comes Twitter Lists which are Twitter’s long awaited “groups” features.

Twitter Lists enables you to segment your followers into groups so that it makes it easier at a glance for you to follow what they’re up to. Twitter Lists aren’t just static listings of users, but live streams of the latest tweets from a specified set of users.

Let’s say you’re into photography. You could create a list around your followers who tweet about photography and that would give you a snapshot of the things they are saying by viewing that list’s page. List’s even allow you to organize people that you’re not following.

Below are some reasons for creating lists:

Group Creation – You could use Lists to organize your tweeps into groups based on anything you want.

Recommend Followers – You could create a public list of followers that you think are worth following. Anyone can view this list and follow the people on it or the entire list if they like.

Follow people who are following you – When you follow a Twitter List you are not following each individual user, but rather the entire list. Tweets within this Twitter List aren’t posted to your main stream. You can visit that list and view its stream. This is especially useful if these people tweet too often and you want to segment them out of your main Twitter stream.

Types of lists:

Public Lists – This list can be seen by anyone and anyone can follow them. They are great for lists of recommended follows.

Private Lists – Only the creator of the list will be able to view and subscribe to them. This is great for lists of competitors that you would like to monitor but not make public. Private lists are identified by a small “closed lock” icon.

Once you find a list you want to follow either through people you follow, third-party sites like Listorious or TweetMeme Lists, just click on the “Follow This List” button. You can unfollow a list from the same page by clicking the “Unfollow” link.

You can find out how many lists you are on by clicking on the “Listed” link on your profile that appears next to your follower and following numbers. It will bring up two tabs: one that shows the list you are following/made, and one that are following you.

If you find yourself on a list that you don’t want to be on, you can remove yourself from that list by blocking its creator. Bear in mind that when you block a person on Twitter that person can no longer follow you. Blocking is reversible and can be undone.