Social media marketing has given businesses feedback from their consumers like they never have had before. Out of your customers, 89% of online users engage in social media, up 83% from a year ago. This is definitely a number that business need to be aware of. Your online reputation is vital to success in marketing today.

Since consumers are turning to social media to get information regarding brands and company’s, it is important for companies to monitor their social media and online marketing presence.

Opinion Research Corporation currently did a study on online social marketing and came up with the following statistics:

• 61% read online reviews and consumer review sites before making a purchase
• 70% researched online for information regarding brands and services
• 83% indicated that online reviews influenced their purchasing decision

Businesses can no longer ignore the power of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, or blog platforms. A businesses online social reputations is critical to their customer growth and loyalty, and monitoring that online conversation is not only important, but necessary for businesses. The amount of feedback that businesses can get almost immediately, as well as being able to control the press about a company helps a business current with their clientele and to truly show they care and support their products and clients.

What Social Media Sites do Businesses Use?

Start by knowing who your audience is and where they are going to get their information.

One of the biggest social media sites today is Facebook. A recent article from Business Insider illustrates how clients are sharing information online. This is a great place to start, and it’s a good chance your clients are using it. If you do alot of business to business transactions, then maybe LinkedIn would be for you. Also, both businesses and consumers use Twitter for quick status updates and alerts. If you have a message that you want to get out in video form or audio podcast, then YouTube and iTunes can help you out. And then, there is always a blog platform such as WordPress to help you have a centralized location, or hub, that reaches out to all of those other networks and keeps your clients up to date with company news. The other thing to monitor is the health of your image using analytic software to check your keyword ranking, visitor stats, Google ranking, and how your marketing campaigns were received by your clients.

Wow, that sounds like alot of Work!

Monitoring your online presence is important, and the work that goes into it is well worth it. Remember those percentages from above…60-80% of consumers will check online before they purchase. Here is a very important point that we are trying to get across to business owners:

Your online social presence is being monitored constantly. The questions is…who is monitoring it, you or your clients?

How to Get Help Monitoring Your Social Marketing

Ok, you understand that it is important to monitor your online presence, and yeah, it will be some work. The work you put into it will show in by the amount of interactions that you have with your clients. This will solidify your clients loyalty to you by showing to them that you care about them.

So, lets say you take the plunge into social media marketing. You get a Facebook Page, a Twitter account, start a blog, syndicate out your posts to the hundreds of social bookmarking sites, put a few videos on YouTube, and get a LinkedIn account for your business. How in the heck can you monitor all of this and still run your business?

You really have two choices in order to monitor your social media marketing:

1. You some of the social media tools available online
2. Hire a company that specializes in social media marketing and monitoring

Option 1: Social Media Marketing Tools

There are several tools available to help you interact with your clients that can consolidate some of the work for you. These tools can help create a dashboard of sorts to help broadcast your message as well as monitor it.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is the leading browser for the real-time and social web, allowing users to connect with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. Businesses can update all their followers and fans easily on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. Easily compose messages in the update window, view your character count, and then broadcast it to the world.

Ping.fm

Ping.fm is a simple and FREE service that makes updating your social networks a snap! A nice feature is the ability to send out messages through Ping.fm “from” multiple locations. A huge array of “Services/Tools” on the dashboard allow you to set up your Ping.fm account so that you can ping via email, SMS, instant message, Facebook app, iPhone app, desktop app, and so on. This serves up enormous flexibility in allowing you to send a single message from anywhere and distribute your message to a large number of profile destinations quickly and easily.

HootSuite

HootSuite is a professional Twitter platform that allows you to manage multiple profiles including Twitter and Facebook, preschedule tweets, measure the stats of your tweet links & view all your direct msgs/mentions/sent/scheduled tweets at once.

As well as using tools to help monitor and interact with clients, there is also the analytic aspects that must also be checked. There are several services out there including Google Analytics, SWIX, GoingUp, and others.

Option 2: Hire a Social Media Marketing Expert



Hire a Professional Team

Of course, this is our recommendation for several reason. As a business owner, your time and energy is best spent on running your business. Whether that be working on the floor, managing your team, working on payroll, customer support, and the list can go on…forever. Business owners are busy running their business. Trying to interact with clients on a whole new level in terms of the media, but also the shear amount of information can be overwhelming at times.

Plus, to be a successful media marketer attention needs to also go to gathering analytics and processing that information and then make the necessary changes to improve the brand of the business. We believe that in order to be successful in this arena, a professional is needed.

One of the services that Mosaic Team offers is Social Media Marketing and SEO Management. We have tools in place to manage multiple clients social media marketing efforts with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, RSS syndication, blog posting, and analytics. Managing an online image for our clients starts from branding such as logo, marketing materials, and a company website to the online image management thru the various social media sites. We feel that a consistent brand and message from beginning to end is important. We help you manage your online image so that you can concentrate on your business.

Give us a call and we can share with you how we can help you monitor your social media marketing.

comments | 287(1 comment)http://blog.mosaicteam.com/managing-your-social-media-marketingManaging+Your+Social+Media+Marketing2010-03-08+18%3A17%3A13admintags |social marketingsocial media