If you’re a community manager who’s publishing, monitoring, engaging, and analyzing communities on multiple social networks manually and individually, you need a hug. We’re sure you’re getting by just fine, because you’re a typical superstar CM that possesses multi-disciplinary skills. But at what point do you cut yourself a break and let a social management platform preserve your sanity?
The expectations on you seem to have gone nowhere but up, while the resourcing has either stayed the same or inched up an embarrassingly uninformed amount. A pro-grade social management platform is not exactly a luxury, it’s STEP ONE in any true commitment to social marketing and customer communication.
You know the best practices. You know the right things to do. But your brand is making it quite an uphill climb for you. I can almost guarantee your CMO does not know what it’s like to be a community manager. I can even almost guarantee the person to whom you directly report has no clue what you do, or how you do it, or what it entails. Sooner is better than later to educate them (and no one can do this but you) on how vital social management platforms have become.
Tell them this is what one could be doing for you:
- Scheduling posts. Lining up the optimum number of posts every day across multiple social networks so fans can get in the habit of consistently seeing content from you.
- Finding and alerting you to mentions of your brand or unwanted content. Let the platform watch for things that need your attention, otherwise you’re stuck watching screens 24/7…and paranoid.
- Gathering richer analytics than native gets you. What if your KPI’s aren’t what Facebook thinks they should be? Don’t get buried in numbers, see the ones that matter.
- Publishing to all of your streams with one click, and from one dashboard. If you’d rather watch a wall of 4 or 5 monitors, and rock 4 or 5 keyboards, knock your lights out.
- Giving you the quickest way to leverage rich media like video, coupons, polls and quizzes that get higher engagement. Optimizing, posting and promoting a video 5 times on 5 different channels is time you’ll never get back.
- Targeting your posts across platforms. Seattle doesn’t want to hear about the deal you’re only offering in Dallas. Too much of that irrelevancy, and they won’t want to see anything from you.
- Integrating with other enterprise systems. If your social marketing is “talking” to your CRM, sales, fulfillment, etc. systems, customers may start to feel like your brand actually knows them.
Even if you enjoy being a social marketing martyr, that doesn’t mean that approach is the most efficient or effective for the company. Encourage your decision-makers to let a social management platform get the repetitive drudgery and busywork off your plate so you can use what makes you particularly valuable, your skills at finding & creating better content and increasing personal engagement with posts.