A social media marketer must be a jack of many trades: content creator, data analyst, community manager, technician and business driver. They’re also mostly self-taught, often work on their own, and are under increasing pressure to justify their efforts against more traditional business outcomes.
Gaynor Alder, Editor-in-Chief of the Modern Woman’s Survival Guide tells Tim Martin how she keeps her social media plates all spinning.
The skills and temperaments required to perform brilliantly across all aspects of social media are too many to fit inside one person. But if such an individual did walk the earth here’s a glimpse of what she’d be capable of performing:
Capital ‘R’ Responsive
Tireless responder to an ongoing slew of comments and questions that are posted daily across her charge platforms. Her return comments and acknowledgements are timely, original (not canned), and sparkle with genuine warmth.
Hosty with the Mosty
Instinctively gets the notion of community – proactively engages people she’s never met and pulls them willingly into her social nexus. And she’s tough enough to enforce community fair play: you’re a welcome houseguest, but leave your shoes (attitude) at the door – or else.
Bear Armor
Handles online barbs (and Barbarians) with unflappable grace: the ill-tempered complaints, the snide one-liners and the serial whiners.
Tester and Measurer and Re-Tester
Relies heavily on data, both from her social media platforms and her website analytics. Borderline obsessed with which types of her content gets shared the most, by whom, and at what times. She is constantly fine-tuning a matrix of variables to maximise her social reach and engagement.
Business Operator
Knows that social media is a means not an end – the business must ultimately benefit in some tangible way. Maintains a focus on increasing conversions that lend value to her organisation, not just boosting followers and likes on the public scoreboard.
The Write Stuff / Thought Leadership
Loves to write, and writes well and fast. The blog is the centerpiece of her social media efforts – she has established strong credibility within her industry sector for deep-diving on a range of topical subjects.
Content Wolf Inside the House
Always on the look-out for practical and story-based content, she has convinced her work colleagues of the importance of helping her write posts for the corporate blog, take more pictures and videos of their business processes in situ, and to appear occasionally in her business videos.
Image Conscious
Feeds her hungry social media babies with a steady diet of images. While simultaneously tweeting she can snap an image, crop it to precise pixel dimensions, change horizontal orientation, apply a filter, overlay text, and compress the file size. She also knows how to source great online images for free under Creative Commons licensing.
Photographer and Videographer to the Stars
Carries her trusted Sony NEX-7 HD video camera with her EVERYWHERE. Never misses an opportunity to capture an evocative image or an engaging video snippet which she can cycle through one or more of her social media channels.
A Human Filter
Oragniser of other people’s online content. Repackages and passes on the best stuff she discovers during her web travels, so long as it’s relevant to the needs of her audience.
Web Monkey
Bends and twists the web to her will: hacks basic bits of code, embeds iframes and snippets of JavaScript with ease, eats RSS feeds for breakfast, and installs campaign specific tracking codes quicker than you can say ‘conversion’.
I Robot
Never eats, sleeps or goes on holiday – that’s for wimps.
Image by by vpickering
I’ve trained hundreds of business professionals over the years on how to use the internet. My focus has been on stripping away the mysteries of the underlying mechanics – I believe that mastery of the foundation building blocks enables organisations to establish a meaningful online infrastructure. Yes, strategic insight is another requirement, but any strategy without the ability to implement it at a tactical level will be compromised.
I’ve also observed that strategies often fail, social media ones in particular, because organisations over-reach their technical and resource capabilities. They have too little hands-on experience to be able to estimate the input requirements – time and money (mostly time) against their expectations of a reasonable return. Understanding the tactical in’s and out’s helps in the formation of a realistic strategy.
If you don’t play with the web – roll in it, push it, pull it and get your hands dirty, you’ll have difficulty appreciating the different scales of difficulty vs. reward – is it just as easy and productive to build up a video library as it is to build up a community on Twitter? Is is easier to elicit online reviews or Facebook Likes and which gets more visibility? Is a blog post that takes an hour to write more or less valuable than a 2 minute LinkedIn status update? People will readily offer their opinions on what do do and what not to do when it comes to social media, but until you’ve attempted to do any of these things yourself how can you get your arms around any ROI calculation?
When you outsource online marketing and social media functions you’re bypassing those valuable experimentation and observation experiences. So roll your sleeves up and get a little dirty – the internet Gods will applaud you.
image by brewbooks
Get the balance right between what you’re offering and what you’re asking for in return.
#tags are useful things – they boost the findability of online content and facilitate the creation of virtual communities around events or activities.
Hashtags inserted within posts on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and Instagram are live – click on one and it will reveal other public posts that share that same hashtag. Inserting aligned hashtags in your own posts will help others discover your content as people search on themed hashtags.
Hashtags enable people who are participating in a shared experience to discover each other and each other’s related social content. Conferences, festivals, television programs, cultural and sporting events are commonly assigned one or more hashtags. This can happen organically or by design by the organisers – either way, they act as a social binding agent for the occasion.
Hashtags are also commonly used in online competitions, enabling organisers to find the social content entrants have tagged as part of an entry requirement, or to judge content they have generated.
And finally, hashtags can be used as a form of expression – not to make a post more findable. Someone for example might tweet in anticipation of an upcoming concert using the hashtag #cantwait.
Hashtags commonly fall into 1 of 5 categories:
General theme – what people would generally and logically use to theme their content, e.g #socialmedia #icecream, #trains, #quotes, #autism, #foodporn
Place – associated to physical places, e.g. #melbourne, #smithst #melbmuseum #parismetro
Event or activity – associated with live events such as conferences festivals, sporting fixtures, television programs, tweet-ups, etc. Organisers of these events and activities will often proactively promote the hashtag they want their audiences to adopt (even if this doesn’t happen, the audience will often make one up and adopt it quickly). Some tags persist across multiple instances of an activity such as a TV show, or they might be one-offs – see below.
Disposable, one-offs – used just once such as at a conference, e.g. #dentalconf13
Brand – promoted by organisations, groups or teams to help people find all related branded content, as well as to encourage others to adopt the tag when referencing the organisation, e.g. #net101 #melbvixons #pwc
Here are some of the do’s and don’ts of using hashtags:
If you want to search a specific hashtag across multiple social platforms, try Tagboard
Image by “CAVE CANEM”
There’s not much difference between the media moguls of the last century and your ability to be a modern day online publisher with your own audiences.
Blogs are the most versatile of online platforms when it comes to publishing business level content. Cultivating a blog can deliver immediate and long-term value which can be measured in a number of ways. Blogs are appropriate to most B2C, and probably all B2B organisations.
The business features of a blog are hard to go past:
David Goldstein from the popular Tacklenappy blog talks to Tim Martin and Gaynor Alder about writing, blog monetisation, juggling competing demands and launching before you’re ready (29 mins).
