At LightSpeed we’ve spent the past few weeks putting a lot of thought into our Social Media Marketing Strategy.
In the past we’ve shared some insights surrounding the importance of Twitter in the South African market place, as well as some insights into what influences SEO.
The comments made by Walter Pike and Anita (@anib) on our view of Twitter and Social Bookmarking led us to reconsider our approach and it became clear that our Social Media Strategy needed some refining.
Taking into account our existing social media profiles, the resources available and the statistics on referrals and activity generated from our social media presence we have decided to focus on the big three main platforms: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
We have maintained a presence on these platforms in the past, but we realized that we weren’t taking full advantage of these platforms as tools for deeper customer interaction, product promotion and a platform to share our expertise and insights.
Over the next few post, we’ll delve deeper into the specifics of our Strategy for each platform. But first a few other observations.
Social Media Tools
There are a lot of tools out there that can help to simplify the managing of your social media marketing efforts. Maintaining multiple accounts with multiple logins proves to be a tedious process, especially when more than one team member is involved and we investigated the use of some of these tools to help us simplify the process.
Hootsuite and Tweetdeck were highly recommended, but in the end we decided on using Hootsuite.
Hootsuite has certain attractive attributes that really stood out for us.:
- It allows us to spread Messages across platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
- Send messages from our mobile phones
- Track Results with real time statistics
- Allows for Team Collaboration and multiple contributors without sharing passwords
- Assign tasks to Team members – allows us to delegate messages, monitor responses and progress
- Schedule Updates
The main drawback to Hootsuite is that is still does not support the functionality to manage LinkedIn Groups or company profiles
If you are a Hootsuite user and would like this functionality to be included in their next upgrade, I urge you to petition them for it here.
Link Shortening
The use of a link shortening client is important. Being restricted to 140 characters on Twitter, you don’t want your message to be gobbled up by a monsterous URL. the use of link shortening opens up some space to say more and room to breathe to clearly convey your message. But there are more benefits to using some link shortening services.
Having decided on Hootsuite as our Social Media Dashboard, it was a no brainer to use Hootsuite’s own ow.ly service. It has an excellent pre-built report that can be customized with add on modules, providing data on referrals, location and retweet or Facebook Like/Share of the links we post – giving us the ability to track our progress and reach.
Stay tuned and come back next week when we delve into the specifics of our Twitter Strategy.
Check out the rest of our series on our new Social Media Strategy:
How we use Twitter – Part 2
LightSpeed on Facebook – Part 3
LightSpeed is LinkedIn – Part 4
Be Genuine – Part 5
Extra: LightSpeed at the Social Media World Forum
