Whether you manage a personal blog, or are part of a corporate social media team, it quickly becomes apparant that social media is very labour intensive. Fortunately there are developers out there who have worked hard to help.
As a professional business to business marketing professional for most of my career, the skills I honed over the years are all related to building and maintaining client relationships. Having a great product or service is not enough. People have to know about, trust in it or you before they will buy.
I write a food history blog called Downton Abbey Cooks, which shares food and recipes inspired by the ITV show Downton Abbey. The setting of the show is a grand english country house in the early 20th century and follows the lives of the artistocratic family which lives there and the servants that attend to their every need.
The blog was a personal space where I could explore and learn about how social media works, and I actually find it more appealing to work on my own projects than to help others make money. As a guesture of “pay it forward”, here are some tips you might find useful in reaching your own business or personal goals.
Gain Followers with Tweet Adder
If you market on Twitter, size matters. The perception is that the more followers you have the more popular you are. You still need a great product, but more followers means a great reach and impressions, meaning other people have seen it through their followers.
I used to spend a great deal of time on Twitter trying to generate content and attract followers, and then I discovered Tweet Adder, a great automated tool which allows me to target and automatically follow users. It also allows you to the ability to send automatic tweets.
Tweet Adder is software that automatically builds up your Twitter Follower Network with like minded individuals for huge increase in your twitter marketing efforts: 5 targeted twitter searches, auto follow, auto unfollow, auto tweet, auto message, twitter trends, proxy supported, set it and forget it. It works just as well for large corporations as your own personal blog.
Costs for Tweet Adder are currently $55 for one profile and is a one time purchase.
Hosting with Go Daddy
Goofy commercials aside Go Daddy has been a great help to me, particularly since I am not a programmer. Go Daddy will help you register your domain names, host your website and walk you through any and all of your end user questions.
Monetize your Site
You can make money from ads on your site and you can choose which products and services fit your audience. Commission Junction is a marketplace worth checking out.
Managing your Content
Bundle Post is relatively new to the market but has some slick features. If you typically “share” and don’t “create” a lot of content, you might want to check this out. It will tie your Google Alert feeds right into the BundlePost dashboard so you can find great articles to share with your followers in the area of your common interest, and easily schedule them into your social channels using HootSuite’s dashboard.
The claim that it will reduce your content management chores by 80% is worth seriously considering.
I have a ”kids fly free” account, but there are upgrades for “frequent flyers” at $50/month and “first class” at $100/month. They currently only use PayPal to process transactions.
Sprout Social: Once you start generating a number of social channels you will find it challenging to keep on top of all the administrative work involved. Sprout Social is a social media management tool which helps monitor your new home for social media management, with all the tools you need in one powerful package. Sprout Social emphasizes the four components of social media effectiveness; Monitoring, Engagement, Measurement and Growth.
- Publish & schedule updates across social channels with a single click
- Monitor your brand & competition across social channels & the web
- Connect with highly targeted customers through our Discovery tools
- Measure success with robust reporting and analytics
- Collaborate with our team, tasks and permissions tools
- Manage it all on the go with Sprout Social For Mobile
Pricing: packages start at $39/month per user and is intended for use by corporate social media marketers.
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