Manage your Social Media Campaign

We have our networks, but now we need to manage our Social Media Campaign

Social media campaigns require some work and activity to make them successful.  We have found the b2b social media networks where our customers, prospects and peers enage. What tools are out there for effective social media management.

In the previous post we outlined a few things to consider when choosing social networks to participate in. Now that you've made your choices, it is time to manage them.

Step 2: Managing Your Social Networks

To start, you’ll have to manually add all of your profile information. You can begin with the basics and fill each of these out over a period of time. Ideally, you want to be updating all of your social profiles about once a month. As you get involved with each social network you will see what type of profile information is necessary to attract the best relationships.

Try making a spreadsheet of all your social networks. Your column headers should be the social network name and URL, your user name, password and finally, the last date of update. It will help you stay on track of all of your profiles.

TIP: Be sure your profiles are similar on each network you choose to participate in. People are leery of chameleons who have a different "facade" in each community. Also, I think it is important to get connected to services that essentially become "profile aggregators" like Disqus, Gravatar, BackType and coComment. These services collect your various presences, show how actively and intelligently your social participate is and are quickly becoming important as credibility tools.

Now, here are some tools you can use to help automate some of your social networking, but be careful not to overuse (and certainly not ABUSE) these tools.

If you’re into viral videos or video updates, Tubemogul is a great tool. After inputting your login information for the corresponding sites, Tubemogul lets you submit a video once and it will then load your video on to sites like YouTube, AOL Video, MySpace TV, Blip.tv and more. Yes, it’s free.

Twitterfeed.com lets you syndicate RSS feeds through Twitter. It can be your blog's RSS feed or other feeds you think your Twitter F & F's would find interesting.

Ping.fm makes it easy to update your status on multiple social networking sites at once. Adding status updates on your LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc many times a day could take you hours – Ping.fm takes just seconds for each update. You can update by phone, by email, even schedule updates with your email client like Outlook. Hellotxt.com is a similar service.
Hootsuite is gaining in popularity, even with some mainstream Internet users. The site basically consolidates all of your social networking accounts and turns them into one feed that you can feed back into other sites (like your Facebook account) in the form of a feed, a tweet or post on Facebook. In that sense, Hootsuite is similar to the "profile aggregators" mentioned above. There is some overlap with Twitter but Hootsuite has enough stand alone features that it is great for managing multiple social media accounts. In addition, it has excellent analytics tracking clicks, analytics and reach.

The Final Word
Avoid social networking burnout by refining your lists of social network profiles to a manageable number that you can update regularly. Also, be careful not to “hook” too many social networks together and accidentally become a big social spam engine where one update triple-posts Twitter and Facebook making your friends & followers think you have social network OCD.

If we missed other tools that are better than what has been listed above, feel free to share them in the comments below.

Paul is the President of Professional Blog Service. PBS works with clients making strategic investments into business blogging, social media and search engine optimization.