Your Guide To Social Media Marketing — And How To Stay Secure While Doing It

Social Media

Your Guide To Social Media Marketing — And How To Stay Secure While Doing It

Social Media

Social media marketing is a hallmark of just about every marketing campaign run. In this article, we’ll shed some insights, share some resources, and give you some tips for securely managing your social channels. Here’s specifically what we’ll cover.

  • Is One Social Network Enough?
  • Six Ways to Expand Your Message on Social Media
  • Gary Vaynerchuk Discusses Why Social Media And Networking Are The Most Important Tools For Success
  • Managing Social Media Security with Multiple Contributors

Let’s get started with the number of social networks.

Is One Social Network Enough?

Although a Nielsen study shows that Facebook has almost four times the number of active users as LinkedIn, the latter is growing nearly twice as fast. The study also reveals that while Facebook is most popular among visitors 25-34 years old, LinkedIn still reigns in as the favorite among visitors 35-49.

Clearly, a choice to limit communications to one social network may mean giving up a sizable audience on another. Finding time to keep up with one network can be a challenge, of course, let alone two or more. Here are the major networks for serious social media marketing consideration.

  • Facebook
  • Linkedin
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • Quora
  • Mastodon

Fortunately, a growing number of tools exist to improve communications across multiple networks. Facebook supports status updates via Twitter, for example, and vice versa, making it easy to update both networks at once. Until connectivity among social networks is universal, however, it may pay to visit more than one.

Gary Vaynerchuk Discusses Why Social Media And Networking Are The Most Important Tools For Success

Where To Start? Six Ways to Expand Your Message on Social Media

The following tips were provided by Communication specialist, Todd Weyandt.

Is your organization interested in a social media presence, but do not know where to begin? Social media seems like a tight rope walk with many uncertain questions looming for most people. Do not worry; it is not as scary as it appears. Practice these six guidelines and you will be on your way to having an effective social media existence.

  1. Be Yourself. Always use real pictures of yourself and other company members. People want to be able to see the human side of the business. Social media allows prospects to get a closer look at the type of people they might do business with. Do not do anything that makes you uncomfortable. Your uneasiness will come through.
  2. Be Specific. Create a detailed plan consisting of the kind of information you want to post. Then follow what you developed. Share items that will have an interest to your followers and fans. Never post anything just to post something. Make sure all posts have a specific reason.
  3. Be Trustworthy. Fans of social media want to follow someone they can trust and relate to. Your sites should be personable, upfront and honest. Social media is not the place to be overtly trying to sell your products and/or services.
  4. Be Talkative. Who you follow is almost as important as who follows you. Put yourself out there; social media is about having a two-way conversation with other real-life people. Think of it as a networking event. Feel free to comment on other people’s posts and updates.
  5. Be Consistent. Your company should have one overarching theme to your message that covers all your marketing and branding. The website, social media, advertisements, etc. should all flow with each other. Post a link to your website on all your social media venues.
  6. Be Disciplined. Social media takes work. Set aside a few minutes every day to update and maintain your sites. It is like most things; the harder you work at it, the greater the rewards.

Yes, social media takes a certain amount of effort. However, it provides a compelling way to communicate with the community of people that might be hard to reach through traditional methods. Go ahead and take your message directly to the right prospects.

Managing Social Media Security with Multiple Contributors

Managing the security of your company’s social media accounts is becoming increasingly more important in the age of tweets and updates. As your business grows, it doesn’t always make sense to remain the sole contributor to the organization’s social media. But how do you keep your social media accounts secure when sharing access with others?

There are a number of ways you can maintain security, from taking simple precautions to using third-party solutions. As more businesses migrate into the social media world, the social media giants themselves are developing new ways for companies to exercise control over accounts with multiple contributors.

Giving employees full access to your social media channels can be really convenient. After all, you won’t always be onsite or available to capture/post those great unplanned moments, and social media might not be your forte; thus, having someone else handle it as well can be a smart move for your business. But if that employee leaves the company, you want to be sure you maintain control of the accounts. Otherwise, you might end up with an embarrassing fiasco on your hands.

Some social media channels have precautions already built-in. Facebook allows you to assign roles to team members, ensuring that they only have the permissions they need. Lower maintenance contributors should not require administrator privileges to your page; for instance, the only permissions that the next level down (Editor) does not have are the capabilities to manage others’ page roles and change the settings of the page itself. You can allow team members to post or even create ads (but not write page status updates), depending on what they need to do. You also can easily revoke their access to the page, if needed. Pinterest has similar role levels.

LinkedIn is a bit trickier. You can easily add and remove administrators if you’re an administrator yourself, but the only roles available are Administrator and Recruiter. In order to post updates to your company page, a team member needs to be an administrator, and another administrator could potentially revoke your access as well. In that case, you’d have to contact LinkedIn to regain control of your page. The recruiter role allows recruiters to post talent updates to your page, but they can’t post page updates or access role permissions like administrators.

Twitter and Instagram, at this point, require you to share your password and username in order to have multiple people publishing new posts. Twitter Ads is developing a new way of doing this for businesses so permissions can be shared in a way similar to Facebook, but this hasn’t rolled out to the general population yet.

You can avoid the security risks inherent in sharing your username and password for these accounts when you use a third-party service like Hootsuite or Buffer. These solutions allow you to share social media accounts with your team, and they have added benefits like auto-scheduling, analytics, and more. Using a third-party provider usually comes with an additional cost, but the added safeguards to your company’s social media can be well worth the cost. And you can easily add and remove team members at any time as well as control their permissions.

Your organization’s social media has a huge impact on your digital reputation. Take these precautions to keep your channels secure as your company grows and your social media contributing team expands. And if the social media platforms’ best practices aren’t practical for your business, consider switching to a third-party service like Hootsuite or SmarterQueue instead.

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