Tools of the Trade

Welcome back to your personal Social Media Masterclass! Today’s lesson is about the Tools of the Trade. Like any other professional endeavour that is made easier with the right tools, so is social media. All of the following mentioned tools are free and have a fairly strong online community around them so if you need some help figuring them out, Google should be able to lead you home.

Social Media Masterclass

Welcome back to your personal Social Media Masterclass! Today’s lesson is about the Tools of the Trade. Like any other professional endeavour that is made easier with the right tools, so is social media. All of the following mentioned tools are free and have a fairly strong online community around them so if you need some help figuring them out, Google should be able to lead you home.

Hootsuite

Let’s be clear about one thing. I love Hootsuite like I love my second monitor. I can’t function without it. I refuse to even think about life before Hootsuite. Seriously, Hootsuite is life changing. There are alternatives to the ‘suite, such as Tweetdeck, Seismic and CoTweet, which I’ve experimented with but I always come back. The reporting is intuitive, list management is a breeze, one login lets you manage multiple accounts and you can share the social media care and feeding with a cohort. What’s not to love?

Full disclosure: I pay $5.99/mo for the professional version.

Google Analytics

I’m assuming you have Google analytics loaded for your corporate website. If not, go get it loaded and come back. (If you have Omniture or similar, that works just as well.) As we get going creating content and engaging with the designated audience, you should keep an eye on your website traffic statistics and how social media influences the traffic. Specifically, benchmark your percentage of inbound referrals before you begin and then check back every month. Ideally, you will see the percentage of referral traffic increase. Also, check the percentage of new visits and average time on site for the social media account you are using. Make sure that you are bringing in new visitors to your site and they are sticking around to check out your content is quite important.

Keep in mind that analytics aren’t just for measuring the past. The presented statistics can also help guide the future. For example, if you have a page of content that is getting a lot of traffic and has a high average time on page, you can make a fairly reasonable assumption that this content is interesting and something that people might want to know more about. Make note of these high-interest pages and refer back to them when creating content for your social media presence.

Crowdbooster

You know how much I love Hootsuite, right? Well, I love Crowdbooster almost as much. The cool thing about Crowdbooster is that it presents your activity in a simple to understand graph. It’s so simple, I can show it to social media neophytes and they get it. Instantly. It also tracks when your ecosystem is most active and recommends when to engage. Although you might be chatting your heart out at 10:45 at night and all of the activity is happening at 9:30 in the morning — it’s going to be really difficult for you to gain any sort of audience.

RowFeeder

RowFeeder is a pretty exciting addition to the social media tool box because it’s so stealthily good at what it does. You simply sign up for an account and enter in the term you want to track and it transmits every Twitter entry to a Google spreadsheet. This is incredibly useful for tracking brand impressions via Twitter. All you have to do is sum the column and you have your total. I have yet to find a better way of tracking how many impressions a press release or news story got via Twitter.

Full disclosure: At EllisDon we’ve never needed anything more complex than the tools mentioned in this article along with some simple spreadsheet calculations.

Smartphone

Undoubtedly you should make your social media presence a “work” thing. Something you do while at your desk and focused (or however you work.) No matter which tool you choose, reporting, linking and online research is considerably easier on the full screen variant. Yet, I do realize that you might have the need to remove yourself from your desk and fullscreen monitor and do something wild like go home.

Once you create your presence and start engaging, you sign up to be the 24/7 voice of your brand. So simplify your life and sync your accounts to your smartphone. The Hootsuite client works brilliantly on an iPhone and it will incite a Naomi Campbell-style rage on the Blackberry so I use the native Twitter client. Make sure to enable notifications when someone direct messages you or mentions you. Doing so allows you to stay on top of your online presence while getting on with your offline life.

A word of caution about smartphones and social media, do NOT try to run your brand’s social media via your phone. It is a recipe for disaster. A lot of the activity associated with managing your brand is around listening, research and reporting — your phone just doesn’t do these functions justice.

And don’t drunk tweet. Ever.

Social Media Masterclass is a collaborative initiative developed by Reed Construction Data and EllisDon. Christine Zakrajsek is EllisDon’s social media manager. Social Media Masterclass appears every Monday in the Daily Commercial News and the Journal of Commerce. Please send any emails to editor@dailycommercialnews.com or editor@journalofcommerce.com