Monitoring How To’s

We are excited to announce the launch of several new features ideal for franchise businesses wanting to leverage the power of social media across all of their locations. When developing these new features, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for large chains to manage social media for each of their stores.  Learn how Franchisors can manage Multiple Locations with Send Social Media:

1. How to write the same post once and insert custom content for each location

Send Social Media now makes it possible for users to define custom tags that can be assigned at a store/location level or at a social media account level. These custom tags act as placeholders at the time messages/posts are composed and are replaced with actual values at the time the message is actually sent. To define custom merge tags for social media accounts, follow the steps below…

a) Sign into your Send Social Media  account and click on My Users.
b) Click “Tags”
c) Create a new custom field/merge tag, by clicking New Field.
d) A new dialog will open up and you’ll be able to enter custom capture information.
e) Select the Category – this is the type of merge tag you will be creating. Options are “Contact”, “User” or “Account” and dictate where these merge tags can be used. For this example, use “Account”.
f) Click Save to add your first merge tag. To add more, repeat the process from c above.

e) Now that you’ve added a few custom tags, you can populate the fields. Since we’ve added Account tags, we can add tags at the account level.
f) To do this, go to Add/Edit Services > My Services. For each of your social network accounts, click the “Tag” button and fill in the relevant information.

g) Now that you’ve added information for each account, you can compose a message and insert merge tags to be replaced with the relevant content at the time your message is sent.
h) Go to the Message Box tab and click “Merge Tags”. You’ll see a dialog window with multiple tags, grouped by category.

i) You can insert tags into your message by clicking on the relevant item from the list.
j) When you’re ready, you can select as many social media services as you like and the merge tags will be replaced with the appropriate content at the time of sending.

2. How to sign off content at the head office before a location publishes content

Head office is often required to approve content before it gets published to a franchise’s social network accounts. Send Social Media’s workflow features make it possible for you to define approval workflows, assign tasks and make sure content is approved and signed off before it gets published to the social web. To create a workflow, follow the steps below:

a) Go to My Users.
b) Click on the user/location in your list who needs approval before content can be published.

c) Under “Approval Workflow”, click “Edit” to be able to define which user needs to approve posts before they get published.

3. How can head office publish content on behalf of a location

Send Social Media’s powerful social media dashboard makes it possible for usrs to share their social network accounts with other users. In the franchise scenario, the head office has the ability to create each of their locations, setup each of their social network profiles and then share these accounts with team members who need to be able to publish to these accounts. The way to set this up using Send Social Media  is as follows:

a) After creating your location instances within My Users, switch to each location’s account and setup their social media profiles for them.
b) Once you’ve done this, go to Add/Edit Services > My Services and use the Sharing button to share these services with the head office user.
c) This will allow head office to post updates on behalf of the location from within their Message Box.


4. How can head office access reports across all of their stores/locations

Send Social Media’s social media analytics features provide you with aggregated reports across each of the franchise’s locations. To access printable reports for individual locations or across the entire franchise, you can do this as follows:

a) Go to My Users.
b) Click the Reports button.
c) You’ll see a new dialog window that you can use to print reports.

trial

A new enhancement we’ve recently added to Send Social Media’s social media monitoring features is the ability to incorporate your Google alerts feed into the results.

Learn how to add a Google Alerts Feed into Send Social Media Monitoring:

  1. In Send Social Media, go to “Add/Edit Services”
  2. If no monitoring has been set up before, choose “Monitoring”, then “Brand Monitoring”, then “Add”
  3. If monitoring has been set up before, toggle to “My Services” on left, and select “Monitoring” tab
  4. Find the keyword monitoring you want to add Google Alerts to, and choose “Edit” on the far-right.
  5. Now, in a separate browser window, login to your Google Alerts
  6. Make sure that where it says “deliver to”, you change that to say “Google Reader”
  7. Now, while pointing at/hovering over the orange RSS icon to the right of the words “Google Reader”, right-click, and select “copy link location” (note: don’t choose “copy image location” by mistake)
  8. Click back to the Send Social Media browser window, and “paste” that link into the Google Alerts feed field.  The link should look like this:  http://www.alerts/feeds/##########, where # represents a bunch of numbers.
  9. Now, click to the beginning of this feed address, and delete the http://, since Send Social Media already has this selected for you in the previous box.
  10. Scroll to the bottom, and click “Save”

Social Media is critical to your organization’s success, especially going forward as more and more customer connections and engagement are moving there. With millions and millions of people spending more and more time on social sites, it only makes good business sense to be there with them. Just like any business decision, this should be thought out and not jumped into haphazardly. Here are 5 steps for successful social media monitoring with Send Social Media:

Know Your Plan
It is always important to know why and what you are going to do before you do it, otherwise you are being blown by the wind. Identifying which social networks best serve your interests and where your best chances are to make an impact on the public is a first step. Twitter and Facebook are givens, but you may find that SoundCloud is a great fit for you, or Pinterest. The more sites you can use effectively the better, but if you get no engagement from the site, move on. You also need to know what you want to accomplish there. Remember that throwing out links and ads left and right is not good social etiquette, you have to be real and engage.

Listen More, Talk Less
You must seek out your audience by monitoring sites for key words and phrases that relate to your mission. If they are mentioning your name, even better. If you are a company that sells patio grills and accessories, you might search sites for mentions of cooking, grilling, recipes, barbecues, or similar things. Once you find people talking about subjects that relate to what you do, you can follow or friend them and start engaging. Once you do engage, promote yourself, but don’t cram it down their throat. Just be friendly with them, and throw in what you can when it comes up.

Recruit Promoters
Once you are engaged, get your new friends to work for you by issuing campaign challenges, asking questions that people can answer and want to answer (these don’t have to be about your business), etc. You can then turn the conversation to something related to your business and attempt to get feedback. This builds the bond. The more you can create a give and take instead of just a give, the better the chance you can get your people to “like” you, retweet you, and generally become brand evangelists for you.

Social means Social
Again, don’t send out links about your latest promotion every hour. A social media site is exactly that, a place for conversations and casual engagement. If you try to convert your Facebook page to your sales floor, you will lose people quickly. There must be a great deal of tact employed with your engagement, finding the right balance between promotion and conversation. Try to think of it as hanging out with your friend and trying to get them to do something for you. You have to spend a lot more time buttering them up than throwing your sales pitch at them. If the relationship is built right, th rest comes easily.

Measure Success
There are simply too many people you will be exposed to to be able to track them by memory or with ticks on a page with a pencil. You will need a solid piece of social media management software to do the job right. The right dashboard gives you the numbers and analytics you need to effectively track how your engagement is increasing traffic and promoters. After all, it’s all about your ROI, and if you aren’t tracking that, then why are you doing it in the first place?

Twitter Hashtags are primarily used so that it’s easy to get a general pulse of groups of people who are talking about the same subject. By searching for a hashtag, you’ll be able to see a stream of all the tweets that include it. This can be extremely useful for both marketing and monitoring.

In terms of marketing, a hashtag is a great way to promote a special event. Choosing a hashtag for your event and then sharing it with others will allow them to create a buzz about your event before, during and after it occurs.

And for monitoring, a few simple Twitter searches can make it easy for you to see what hashtags are popular within your industry. You can then save those searches so you can keep an eye on any new topics that start gaining momentum. Send Social Media makes it easy to monitor conversations.

The other strategy you’ll definitely want to employ for optimizing your account is to start using Twitter Lists. The reason that lists are such a useful feature is because they allow you to create groups for both your own use and the use of others. Additionally, it’s a great way to get a pulse of what a specific segment of Twitter users are doing.

Creating a list is quite easy to do. Once you click the new list link that’s visible on your profile page when you’re logged in, you can choose whether you want it to be public or private. From there, you can either add the URLs of the Twitter users you want in the list, or you can navigate to their page and directly add them. You may also find that it’s quite useful to follow existing lists that other people have created.

Send Social Media allow you to automatically send a response to anyone who mentions your specific hashtags.  This is an excellent marketing tool for busy social media managers who don’t want to miss the chance to engage with a potential client.  By striking up a conversation automatically, this tool gives you the opportunity to truly engage with potential clients who are talking about your field of expertise. Follow these steps to configure the Twitter auto reply tool on your Send Social Media account.

social media managementDaily Task

If you want your best content to get the social media attention it deserves, you need for it to be noticed by influencers. And since people who fit the profile for being a customer of your business use social media, it’s important to have a way to bring them in as leads. While both of these tasks can seem like major challenges, the good news is you can accomplish each one with the help of social media monitoring.

What’s the Best Way to Find Relevant Influencers?

Just because someone is a social media influencer doesn’t mean they’re going to be interested in your content. In order to find the right influencers, you need to find people within your industry and/or niche. Fortunately, this is something that a quality social media monitoring tool will make easy for you to do.

With the help of the right tool, you’ll be able to identify people who are sharing content that’s related to your business. Next, you’ll be able to see what kind of reach and engagement that content generates. From there, it will be possible for you to start building relationships with the influencers who are originally sharing the content.

Tips for Using Social Media Monitoring to Find Leads

What’s great about the strategy outlined above is not only will you be able to find the influencers who are originally sharing the content, but you’ll also have an opportunity to identify the people who are interacting with that content. Since that interaction is a clear sign that people have an interest in your industry and/or niche, there’s a very good chance that they may be ideal leads for your business.

While this type of identification is a very good starting point that can help you generate leads, it’s just one of many options for social media lead generation. For Facebook, two proven strategies are competitions and customized tabs. On Twitter, Lead Generation Cards can work very well when utilized correctly.

What’s really appealing about Lead Generation Cards is even if you’re in a B2B industry that may present challenges in terms of shareable content, the targeting provided through this program may be exactly what you need to reach the right users. The same can be true for using the various targeting tools that LinkedIn provides.

Finally, while it can take extra effort to create quality videos for YouTube, this platform can be very useful for generating leads. Not only can YouTube videos allow you to target specific search engine result pages, but the format is very conducive to driving leads. By providing an introduction to useful information and then asking viewers to enter their email address if they want more, you’ll find that it’s possible to achieve a very strong conversion rate. Having that ability is one of many reasons why YouTube is an excellent social media tool for business.

If you’re ready to start using a tool that will make it possible for you to identify influencers and find leads, take a look at all the features our social media monitoring dashboard has to offer. If you’re looking for the simplest way to stay on top of your company’s social media efforts, be sure to take a look at the Send Social Media Dashboard 7-day trial!

Whether you’ve been utilizing social media for your business or are just getting started, you’ve probably noticed that there is always a lot going on. Because social networks are so active, plenty of businesses feel a little overwhelmed in terms of staying on top of everything. If you’re in a similar situation, social media monitoring can be extremely useful. To understand exactly why, let’s look at ten reasons right now:

Find Leads

The best leads are people who are currently in need of exactly what your business offers. And since social media is a real-time medium, being able to instantly find those conversations can do a lot in terms of generating leads.

Hone Pitches

Not only are relevant conversations very useful for generating leads, but they also help you understand how people talk about what you’re selling. With that insight, you can better hone your marketing messages to connect with the right prospects.

Identify Influencers

A big part of social media marketing is trying to get your content and brand in front of the right audiences. Since influencers can help a lot in that department, it’s worth taking the time to build a relationship with them. Monitoring tools make it simple to determine which users are considered authorities within your industry.

Handle Complaints

Being able to respond and resolve someone’s problem as soon as they post it online can instantly change their negative experience with your business into a positive one.

Measure ROI

As a business, you want to get a return on the time you invest into social media. While that used to be quite difficult to determine, social media monitoring means that it’s now possible to pinpoint exactly how much your business is benefiting from what you’re doing with social media.

Optimize Your Efforts

Having a social media dashboard that presents you with easy to digest data means you’ll quickly be able to understand which of your social media efforts are driving the most results.

Learn More About Competitors

With the right brand monitoring tool, you can easily stay on top of what’s being said about your business, as well as what social media users are saying about your competitors. This will make it easy to see what they’re doing right, and the areas where they’re dropping the ball.

Get Feedback

Being tapped into social media conversations is an excellent way to get actionable feedback about your products and services.

Build Your Brand

Since monitoring is generally part of a social media engagement strategy, having this type of consistent activity means that you will become more visible, as well as establish your brand as one that cares about engaging with its customers.

Protect Your Reputation

If someone has any type of problem with your business and decides to post about it, being aware of that post as soon as it goes live means you can get on top of that situation before it blows up into a much bigger problem.

As you can see from the above list, using social media platforms for marketing without having any type of social media monitoring is a lot like flying blind. Since that can be very frustrating and limit the results your business gets from marketing through social media, utilizing the right social media monitoring tool is a very wise decision.

At Send Social Media, we are very passionate about social media. But that passion isn’t just because we think social media is fun. Instead, it comes from the firsthand experience we have of seeing just how much social media can transform businesses. Whether you’re in a B2C or B2B space, social media makes it easier and more cost-effective than ever before to connect with highly targeted prospects.

Although social media can work extremely well for just about any type of business, that doesn’t mean this form of marketing is always intuitive. Plenty of businesses dive into social media with big expectations, only to be disappointed by the lack of traction they end up seeing.

Whether you’re currently in that position or you’ve been hesitant to even get started with social media, we want to explain why the right social media marketing dashboard can help bring all the necessary pieces of a successful strategy together:

Eliminate Guesswork

One of the most common reasons business struggle with social media marketing is they have a hard time telling what’s working and what isn’t. This stems from the fact that even though most social platforms now provide analytics data to businesses, that data isn’t always presented in an actionable way. Since our social media dashboard for businesses was specifically designed to easily monitor and compare key data, we solve this important issue.

Streamline Your Activities

Another challenge for businesses is being able to stay active across multiple social platforms. Given that different social sites can require their own strategies, manually managing all this activity can consume a lot of time and resources. Fortunately, our dashboard brings everything you need into one location. And thanks to our white label social media management, it’s even possible for agencies to stay on top of all the accounts for multiple businesses.

Make Consistency Your Default

Social media is something that builds momentum over time. So when a business is unable to stay consistent with their activity, it greatly reduces their likelihood of finding traction on that platform. Our social media marketing dashboard solves that problem by giving businesses the ability to schedule posts and updates. That means you can sit down and take care of a week or even month’s worth of updates all at once.

Power-Up with Email

While social media is great for bringing targeted prospects into your funnel, it’s generally not the best for converting them into customers. Since email does a better job of that task, we’ve built our dashboard to seamlessly integrate email marketing into your social efforts. That combination makes it possible to fully unlock the power of social as a key driver of growth for your business.

To see just how well our social media marketing dashboard can work for your business, be sure to schedule a live training session with our team.

Categories
Categories