• should you send updates in the morning or the afternoon?
• should you ask questions or make statements?
• are your retweets/comments getting more or less as time goes by?

If you don’t know, you’re working harder than you need to to get the results you want.

Everyone knows that a graph that slopes up to the top right is good…and a graph that doesn’t is bad…so why not monitor your social media efforts so that you can see at a glance which graph applies to your business? The cost and effort for putting in place some basic monitoring is negligible, so why not give it a try.

Services that you might want to look at are: SproutSocial, Hootsuite, 20Feet at the low end of the market, and all of them have something different to offer.

So give it a try and see what happens.

If you would like some advice on how to set these up or just have a general chat about monitoring, you can book me by the hour as your social media consultant, simply visit my contact page and drop me a line. If you want too have a go for yourself then you may find this article of interest.

Obviously (and although it goes without saying, I’ll say it anyway) the first thing is that for this to work you have to be good at what you do. Secondly, you have to be credible. Thirdly, you have to be believable and able to represent yourself appropriately – but because you’re an expert, of course all oft those things are true.

The way that you’re clients and acquaintances recommend you to others is brilliant, but it is often hard for them to do so. Not because they have their doubts, but because they don’t have a ready vehicle for doing so. They don’t have a ‘one click’ referral machine – or rather they didn’t – but now with social media they do. And of you play your cards right they could be pinging-off referrals and introductions like a machine gun! All you need to do is teach them how.

Give it some thought and it should all become clear.

For most businesses it is a marketing tool. Clearly the marketing function within the business should be setting the strategy and implementing the plan. And this is fine p to a point. However, marketers (and I am one of these) tend to see the world of social media through the same lens as other marketing channels, using expressions like audience, demographics, impacts and recall… What marketers want is a platform to broadcast their brand message to a large audience in a cost effective (or better still free) manner. An herein lies the problem. Social media is NOT an advertising channel. Trying to sell through social media is possibly a recipe for disaster.

So, if it isn’t marketing, should it be customer service. Certainly Dell (to pick a company at random) use social media very efficiently as a tool to understand when their customers are unhappy or have a problem and to engage these potential detractors by solving the problems and promoting the great service that you can expect from the company. It is an efficient, engaging and low cost way of keeping your customers satisfied. But often customers require a more personal service than a Twitter feed or a Facebook page can deliver.

OK, how about PR then? Certainly PR is a great place to get some huge benefits from using social media, but PR people (like marketers) tend to view the benefits of social media as if it were in a silo. Whilst social media can encourage the story to spread and be picked-up by many sources. PR people tend to be about column inches rather than readers – “your story has appeared on 27 different websites”…so what. It still doesn’t mean that anyone has actually read it!

So, if it’s not PR or marketing or even customer service who should be in charge of social media?

Well, in an ideal world…nobody.

As a business tool social media spans so many areas within a business – all of the above, plus community, research, recruitment, personal development, customer acquisition, technical support…in fact pretty much every single area in which a business needs to touch people either customers, prospects, staff, stakeholders, advocates and detractors.

To try and compartmentalise social media is like saying which department should have a telephone…the answer is every single one.

So why not give me a call to discuss how social media can help streamline your business.

Often social media is viewed as a cheap advertising channel (which of course it can be if you’re careful) but it can be so much more.

Social media can help with;

• sales (both tactical and strategic)
• customer acquisition
• identifying champions and advocates
• determining your net promotor score
• customer care
• customer support
• new product development
• brand promotion
• staff retention
• competitor research

The list goes on and on. In fact it’s probably just cleaning and canteen services that it doesn’t help!

So why do so many users not fully engage with the possibilities?

For many businesses I guess that the problem is that they don’t have either the expertise in house to operate social media properly or there is no internal champion who is prepared to stick-out their neck and really go for it. It seems like a terribly missed opportunity though. Using social media to do many of these tasks will deliver an immediacy and ease which is unprecedented AND will offer huge cost savings.

So, if you’d like to talk a bit about the big picture, why not get in touch to use me as your social media consultant.

1. Measure. Your foray in to social media needs to be run with the same level of professionalism as every other area of your business. So, just doing it and hoping for the best a ludicrous. Knowing how many of your followers you’r engaging is a crucial part of seeing if (with time) you’re getting better or worse it it. Then with luck you can start to see a ROI for your efforts…here’s a bit more on that.
2. Listen. There is an old saying that says “you have two ears and one mouth, use them in those proportions”. Nowhere is that more true than in the world of social media. If you just start broadcasting and assume anyone will listen you are deluding yourself and in for a nasty surprise.
3. Timely replies. As with all areas of the digital world, a key element for success is getting back to people quickly. If someone leaves a comment or sends you a message it is vital that you get back to them as soon as possible…not in a day, not in an hour, but now. Any delay may mean that the opportunity has passed by.
4. Talk like a person. “Adam Gray would like to assist you in identifying….” is not how real people talk. Write as if you were having a chat with a friends and you can’t go too wrong.
5. WIIFM or (what’s in it for me). When you send any messages, tweets or posts you are asking your followers to invest time in you to read what you’ve written (or follow the link) as yourself honestly if they really need or want to know that your coffee has gone cold or that you’ve had your best month for sales ever…believe me, they don’t. Sending vain, pointless or obnoxious updates will switch people off rather than engage them.
6. Little and often. Spending every Friday updating stuff is a waste of your time and your followers’ time. I don’t want to see 25 consecutive posts on my timeline from you because you’ve nothing better to do. What you should be doing is a couple of posts/updates each and every day, a few minutes reading what others’ are doing and a few minutes examining your key metrics.
7. DIY – do it yourself. Social media is an engagement tool. It enables YOU to talk to YOUR CUSTOMERS when and where THEY want to talk. So, if you are managing director of a business and you want a Twitterfeed YOU need to do it, not your secretary. It’s about YOU building relationships not your secretary. If you wouldn’t send someone else to take your best client to dinner…don’t get someone else to tweet for you.
8. Pick your platforms. Decide where you think you can be most active and effective  and begin with these platforms. Google+? YouTube? LinkedIn? They all have something to offer, but you can’t be everywhere (certainly not to begin with) so pick a couple of good ones and go for it.

Surely there’s no point in using a social media consultant is there? After all, 900,000,000 people know how to use Facebook so it’s not that hard is it?

Well, I suppose at one level that’s right. Everyone can use social media – in fact the social platforms have spent millions developing them exactly so everyone can use them. But using them and using them well are two entirely different things.

What s social media consultant brings is experience in helping you select which if the platforms you should be investing your time on and how to set them up properly from the word go. Clearly you could learn how to do this yourself (you could also learn everything about tax and the law and become your own accountant and lawyer) but this probably wouldn’t be good use of your time…you should be running your business and doing what you do best.

Is your goal just to have a great social media presence? Or is this a means to an end? Do you want social media to deliver a steam of prospects and enable you to develop new and existing relationships with these prospects. If it’s the latter, then you definitely need an expert.

A good social media consultant will have a background in some sort of media – marketing, copywriting, advertising – and will understand how people react when they’re exposed to messages and will be able to apply this solid marketing background to the world of social media. Simply learning about the platforms isn’t enough if your consultant is going to deliver value to your business.

Key questions you may want to ask a consultant before employing them are; “how will you measure the success and failure of the project” or “what will the business benefit for this be”? In either case you need to hear a good solid answer which doesn’t include comments like “it’s all about brand building and visibility” because it isn’t…it’s all about sales (or cost saving)! If your consultant can’t explain exactly how they’re going to tie social media activity back to your profits it’s probably because they don’t know…and you should keep looking for the right person!

If this sounds like the sort of thing you’d be interested in, please get in touch via my contact page.

An old friend of mine pointed me at this fantastic info graphic…well worth a read.

I got it home, unboxed it and fell in love with the rubberised little chap…except for the truly awful and clunky OS. Nobody in their right mind would ever buy this in preference to an iPad, and despite the fact that it’s under half the price it only offers 1/4 the value!

However, yesterday I updated the software to OS2 and to say that it has transformed the Playbook is an understatement. Now with native email and calendar apps you can start to see just what a great little tool this is.

Email (always Blackberry’s strong suit) shows most desktop computers a clean pair of heels let alone phones & tablets. It’s fast, handily sized, beautifully made…and cheap too!

Is it an iPad eater…no, but at well under half the price it doesn’t need to be, it does however eat any other sub £300 tablet for breakfast.

So if you fancy one of these you’d better get a move on as the next shipment to your local store won’t be £169!