Social Media Savvy

Getting involved in social media is quickly becoming the norm for companies. However, for companies without dedicated social media resources or a small staff this can seem like a daunting task.

Even if you can't get involved by actually pushing out content you can still pull your customers back into you. Use monitoring tools to look through the social content on the web already and respond to comments about your brand. These are several tools out there that are fragmented that you can use, like the search feature built into Twitter and Google's Blog Search. However, there are also tools that aggregate everything said about your brand like TrackUR, Brandseye and Radian6 (my personal favorite).

Helpful tips:
1) Set aside time each day to devote to looking through tools to see what people are saying about your brand, product or even what they are saying about competitors.
2) Engage the consumer, reach out to them and try to point them in the best place to go for information.
3) If your company plans on ever getting involved in social media invest in the monitoring tools, they are usually affordable and save resource time.
4) Build a simple case for the tools based on your hourly investment: add up the amount of time it would take with the cost monitoring tools and compare it to the amount of time required without the tools. Then take your hourly rate, multiple it by the extra hours each week and figure out the total cost every month and then every year for the cost of your time. Odds are, the monitoring tools will cost less.
5) Report! Report! Report! Reporting out what you find using charts and graphs to illustrate how the conversation in the social space will go on without you and what is being said. The data in this report will help to entice leadership into getting involved with social media. They may not know the value unless YOU show them.

Remember, don't go off and act as a company rep on these tools without the appropriate leadership buy-in. You can contact them individually if you are clear that you are contacting them and that your contact is in no way supported by or affiliated with your company. However, I really just recommend talking to your company and getting support to push users to pre-approved company content or to only respond with approved content.