In the increasingly competitive business world we live in, reaching the top and staying there takes a lot of time and hard work. Business leaders are expected to juggle planning and strategic thinking, staff management, sales and marketing, and much more, as well as having an in depth knowledge of the day to day operations of every department within the company. There are only 24 hours in a day, so priorities have to be made.
One area that’s often passed by is social media management, yet this can be a real mistake. If you don’t have time to personally provide social media management then it pays dividends to outsource the function to social media managers who do have the time, knowledge, and expertise.
How Much Time Does Social Media Management Take?
How much does it take to manage a social media profile? If you’re doing it correctly the answer can be longer than you think. For a start, it’s not enough to simply have a profile on Facebook. Other platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ are growing in popularity and influence all the time, and your business needs to be on all of them. It’s also essential to update these profiles on a regular basis. Posting regular, high quality, updates will not only help your profile climb the rankings and be seen by more people, it will encourage users to ‘follow’ or ‘like’ your pages. The content should be tailored to reflect your brand, and your corporate values, whether it’s 140 lines long, or 140 characters. Now you begin to see how much time and effort social media management can take.
Effective Customer Interaction
Every business wants to gain new customers, and retain the ones they already have. This involves communication, and there’s no better place to do it than on social media platforms. Never forget that this communication isn’t a one way street. Customers will use social media to contact your business directly, and they won’t be prepared to wait for a response. Studies show that nearly forty percent of social media complainers expect a response within an hour or less, but the typical response time is over five hours. Is that the way to win back customers? If you and your staff don’t have the time to respond instantly to social media communications then you really should put it in the hands of someone who does.
Keeping Up With The Latest Trends
Social media is a fast moving world, and trends come and go at regular intervals. Keeping up with the latest social media trend takes time, knowledge and understanding. If you keep doing the same things on social media year after year, it will soon look dated, and that’s bad news for your business. Social media managers can ensure that your posts and profiles always look up to date. One example of changing trends is the increasing popularity of short video content on social media, with over 12 million Vines posted on Twitter every day, and more than a billion YouTube users worldwide. Exciting content can help your posts, and your business, get noticed. Find out more at www.juanq.co.za