How to Maximize Your Social Media Marketing Strategy Now

Use social media management systems to maximize your social media marketing strategy.

For startups, nothing is more important than building a buzz for your services or products. And social media marketing can help you do just that.

According to an article on Inc.com, social media campaigns have been a vital part of many companies’ marketing strategies for the past five years or so.

Nowadays, it seems like everyone’s on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and various other social media sites. So yes, your buyers are probably interacting with information on social media sites right now and, of course, you want to be found wherever your prospects and customers spend their time.

While we know the importance of using social networking to drive sales, it’s still difficult for many of us to find the time to tweet, share Facebook posts, interact with our networks on LinkedIn and upload product images on Instagram.

Want to save time by managing your entire social media campaign from one location? How about build a buzz for your online web presence as efficiently as possible? Of course you do.

We have four words for you: social media management system (SMMS).

Social media management systems are about much more than managing your social media campaign … they help you efficiently and effectively manage it.

The Digital Marketing Depot outlined several benefits and challenges to using a SMMS platform in its report, “Enterprise Social Media Management Software 2013: A Marketer’s Guide,” including:

Benefits

• Enhanced workflow management
• Ability to monitor and control all social media campaigns from one location

Challenges

• Can be a significant investment, especially for small businesses
• Some platforms require extensive training and integration with your existing business systems

Today, we want to introduce you to HootSuite – an SMMS platform that allows users to schedule posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and several other social media sites. Not sure about the best times to share social media content? You can use the platform’s automated post option to schedule the timing of your tweets and posts.

Simply write up your post and HootSuite will post it automatically for you, whether you’re online or not. So what would take hours each day now only requires a few hours in one day for entire month or the coming months. Talk about maximizing time spent on social media marketing!

And the best part – it’s free.

Promotion across multiple social media sites isn’t the whole story with HootSuite. You can also receive analytics about how your posts actually reach your potential customer base, manage team promotions, cross post to your Google+ page (which Hootsuite is one of the few apps out there that Google has actually partnered with to do this), and there’s even an educational series that HootSuite developers offer to business owners, called “HootSuite University,” which highlights the various ways to benefit from advertising on social media platforms.

While the basic plan is free (and provides everything you need to effectively and efficiently manage your small business social media marketing), HootSuite offers paid plans with all the bells and whistles if you need a more robust SMMS platform. We know our audience loves free stuff, so we’ll focus on that plan in this blog post, but feel free to scoot on over to HootSuite and check out details on its paid plans.

Free Social Media Management

You can get quite a bit of mileage from HootSuite’s free service. For starters, you’re allowed to promote on five social media profiles of your choice including Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, Foursquare, WordPress Blogs and multiple other sites such as Tumblr, Instagram and Vimeo.

As mentioned, you’ll have access to HootSuite’s built-in automated posting tool, which will pick a time in the future to share social media content on the same day you’ve posted it. Also, you can have two RSS feeds as part of your free HootSuite account.

Now, what you won’t get is full access to its analytics (although some reporting is available with the free option), and the ability to schedule multiple posts of the same content all at once. You also won’t be able to set you multiple user accounts to have other members of your team using Hootsuite to share content.

Don’t Forget to Socialize

Now, SMMS platforms like HootSuite can definitely save you time in sharing social media content. But don’t forget that social media is all about being social – so don’t forget to engage in the conversation by retweeting and commenting on content shared by others in your online community.

What’s the Word: As a startup, you wear many hats and saving time and money is critical. Using a social media management system like HootSuite will allow you to do just that. By the way, we use HootSuite’s free plan to manage our social media marketing campaigns and it meets our needs just fine.