Business and Marketing
Companies have all but fully embraced social media in their business plans already, but the integration in 2012 will become all-encompassing, with social media dwarfing other marketing activities. The increase will become so pervasive that it will become a given and a business necessity to have brand monitoring software to track engagement and measure ROI.

Companies will also move away from having a marketing department that also handles social media. The new necessity to survive the competition will be a director of social media, and possibly a staff that does nothing but. This is because social sites will become the new customer service centers of corporations, tailoring their practices to fit into the customers’ paradigm.

Marketing will finally find the ultimate sweet spot in social media, where well-planned campaigns become almost effortless and extremely more effective due to fitting in the target market’s activities rather than becoming an extra activity. Businesses that can see the future and prepare properly will thrive. Those who do not will sink, and we are likely to see a shake-up and shake-out of businesses in the coming year as this heats up.

Mobile Social Activities
With the smartphone and tablet markets already in full gear, this will be the year that they rise toward the saturation point. These markets have been sitting in the 20-35% adoption range for a couple of years, but the latter half of 2011 saw then inching higher each month. In 2012 this market will break 50% and beyond, and in doing so social media activities will follow and become much more mobile than they are tethered to a laptop or desktop. Social gaming will continue to grow at astronomical rates, incorporating more and more advertising as well as real-world activities that tie in.

News Will Be Primarily from Social Sites
Twitter really began the cycle of distributing news through social media a few years ago, but it has really grown into a powerful force today, with many people getting the majority of their daily news through social sites. This trend will only continue, and as major media outlets embrace it more and more it will become better structured and the primary source for most people to get their news, in one way or another. We have already seen in newscasts and in this election cycle the engagement and inclusion of Twitter and Facebook as legitimate sources of engagement and feedback from viewers, and this year’s Presidential election will likely see a huge impact from the social side of things.

Facebook will break 1 billion users, but Google+ will release their API and Rule the World
Facebook will get the push over the 1 billion mark by adding users from countries with lower rates of adoption, and they will remain a dominant player in every aspect of the social scene, which will mean the web itself. However, Google has already taken bold moves in recent days and months to set themselves up for the biggest putsch in internet history. They have steadily been integrating and tweaking their vast products and resources to eventually form one hub to rule them all, just as the Google search site was for years. With Google+ taking off in the last 4 months and being integrated with everything from search to pictures to documents to email to everything else, Google will complete this consolidation and finally release their API for third-party development, and in a matter o months they will out pace Facebook and once again become the dominant force on the internet. Once this happens it will be a coups that will be hard to undo.

Social media and blogs drive far more traffic than print or traditional media advertising today, so it’s vital that you make a solid effort to use these platforms to your advantage, and do it well. In order to do this effectively as a business you need good social media management software with plenty of features. What kind of features are important in your franchise business, you ask? There are 6 that you definitely need to make sure that you have.

Autoresponder
Running a business requires lots of time, and you don’t have the budget in a franchise to hire a dedicated social media director, so you need your social media dashboard to be able to automatically respond to inquiries and mentions. If you wait until you have the time to sit down and respond to every little thing, your potential customers will have moved on to more responsive pastures.

Wide range of platforms
Facebook pages are great. So is Twitter. If this is all you are getting though, then you are missing out on a huge chunk of the social space out there. Blogs, Foursquare, email, sms, friendfeed, the list goes on and on. A good piece of brand monitoring software will cover all of your bases, not just two or three.

Tracking and Analyzing
You’ve got to know what the data means, not just how many people visited your page last month. The tracking part is important, but it should track things like click-throughs, not just eyeballs. If it’s not helping the bottom line, it’s not doing you any good.

Location Based services
 If you are a brick and mortar franchise, location based services are a must. Allowing people to check in with Foursquare and being able to track that traffic is a huge plus when you have a physical location that people can visit.

Tracking specific content
Which of your tweets, posts, and blogs are making an impact? After all, you don’t want to keep sending out things that aren’t being received well. Make sure that your software can track individual posts so you know what to repeat and build on, and what to leave alone. 

Sentiment
You want to know what people think, not just that they are visiting your site or talking about you.  Sentiment analysis software will tell if your mentions are positive or negative and lets you know what to respond to and what to leave alone.

It’s Hot
Riding trends is not the most desirable way to run a business for everyone, but taking advantage of existing markets of potential customers is always smart. In other words, when you’ve got a handful of doodads to sell, what’s more effective, taking out an ad somewhere for “doodads for sale” or walking down to the flea market and unloading them in an hour or two?

Pinterest is seeing meteoric growth in the last 6 months, and they haven’t come close to plateauing yet, so you should definitely be browsing the site and mingling as a business. There are too many people there right now. If you are ignoring where people are gathering, you are missing out.

It’s Measurable
Just like any other social media endeavors, a good set of social media software tools can track and assess your engagement and effectiveness on the site. Lots of people + knowing how you are viewed and received there = good analytics for developing a strategy. Any time you can be involved with a large group of consumers and measure that involvement, you can find profit potential somehow.

It’s the Right Crowd
The majority of Pinners on Pinterest are late twenties to mid forties women. Guess who the largest group of consumers is? You got it. Not only is it a huge group of people, it’s a huge group of people who buy things. You are not only engaging people here, you are engaging the people who statistically are the most likely to become a customer. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

It’s Different
The thing that sets Pinterest apart other than its demographic is the style of the platform. While every other social site is primarily text with visual and audio mixed in, Pinterest turns the tables by making the visual aspect the primary focus and the text secondary. This makes it different enough to withstand competition from other social sites. Pinners are likely to also be Facebookers, Tweeters, or Plussers, because the sites are different enough to avoid too much overlap in substance. Any new upstart could always turn out to be a flash in the pan, but Pinterest likely has good staying power.

1. Open the Message Box and choose Photo or File.

2. Choose the files you want to upload.

3. Hit Open.

You will now see your files download one by one by themselves, leaving you to get on with writing your message.

NB. Please note that this new upload process uses Flash. You also have a limit of 1.5MB per file and may upload up to 10 files for each message.

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.

Well, first check your Twitter and Facebook pages, and…what? You’re kidding right? Ok, we need to talk.

Social media is not, I repeat not an extra in today’s business world. It is priority number one when it comes to marketing, or at least it should be. It’s a brave new social world out there my friend, and the future of advertising is on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. Actually, the NOW of advertising is there. Before you can get your pages set up the trend will have moved even more in that direction, even if it only takes you an hour to do so.

Social media is effective, period. If, that is, you take it seriously and play right. The reason it’s so effective is that it is where people spend most of their time now, internet-ently speaking. It allows you to get in front of peoples’ faces in a much more effective way than TV or any such ancient idea. People mute commercials and fast-forward their DVR’d shows through them. Social Media is real time advertising, and much more.

It allows you interaction with your customers. You can share interesting things with them that may lead to a discussion of how your product or service can enhance their lives. You just can’t get that kind of interaction in the check-out line at the store, and the chat boxes that pop up on the screen of the websites are summarily dismissed for the most part. On Facebook or Twitter, though, there is a very real possibility of quality interaction. The viral nature of the internet also allows for a wildfire-like spread of your name when you hit the sweet spot. Get some brand promoters tweeting about you to their several thousand followers, and bingo – overnight you can pick up enough business to pay the phone bill next month.

Now you can read elsewhere exactly how to set your pages and presence up on these sites – heck, there are tons of books on the subject – but we are here to tell you that you have to be able to manage these sites effectively. The best way to do that, hands down, is with a quality social media dashboard. This little piece of genius will track your engagement, your effectiveness, and your click-throughs, just to name a few. It will even let you schedule tweets to your huge following in the far east while you are sound asleep dreaming of the new car you will be able to buy soon.

Make no mistake, my entrepreneurial friends, good social media management software should be the first investment you make after you have your new computer to connect you to the vast inter-webs. Even before the name plaque for the basement door.

1. Track your Competition
You not only need to know what’s going on with your own business, you need to know where you stand with your competition in the space. You can just as easily track them as you do yourself with the right searches set up.

2. Time Management
This is key. Productivity is all important to be efficient, and having a staff to take care of your social exploits is just too expensive for most. As one business owner pointed out recently, he used to spend 10 minutes per client per day just responding to and checking on their engagement in the social space. That’s all day long. With the help of a social media dashboard, he now spends 20 minutes per month instead.

3. Brand Management
Using the dashboard allows you to set up keyword searches that will track what people are saying about you and you product or service. Being able to find these quickly and engage the commenters can prevent trying to put out forest fires of bad sentiment later, or encourage good sentiment now.

4. Schedule and Auto-Respond
This is also time management. If you want to post several times a day to different networks, they need to be spread out. The scheduler feature of a dashboard lets you spend some time once a week or a month setting up what you want to send and when, and then let it do its thing. The auto-responder also let’s you be engaged with your audience without having to stare at the screen all day. Setting up simple Thank You messages for comments or similar things can make sure that they don’t feel like they are wasting their time posting, then later you can get back to them in a more detailed fashion if warranted.

5. Find New Customers
When you can track what people are talking about, you can narrow in on those who seem to have an interest in what you have to offer, so that you can engage them and win them over.

6. See How Effective Each Post Is
Each message or post that you throw up on the screen can be tracked to see if anyone is responding to it. Knowing this is important, because it allows you to find out what is effective and what is a flop.

7. Collaboration
Most dashboards give you collaborative power so that coworkers across the building or across the world can work together on your social media campaign, increasing both productivity and effectiveness.

8. Track More Than Just Social Sites
With a good social media dashboard, you can also track what’s being said about you on blogs and RSS feeds, as well as other various sources. Not everything is said on Facebook and twitter, and this can often give you even more insight since when someone bothers to comment on a blog post, they usually have something to say that you should be listening to.

9. Find Out if Your Traffic is Coming From Social Sources
The visits to your website – where are they coming from? Knowing whether they came from a Google search or a social click-through lets you know where you need to focus your energy.

10. It Makes You Look Smart and Get the Girls
Let’s face it, chicks dig social media dashboards. Oh, they may tell you that you’re a geek to your face, but secretly they know that you are a genius for having the business savvy to use one, and they will eventually give in and fall at your feet. This might be a stretch, but you definitely should know that you are smart and business-savvy if you are using a dashboard, and, well, the opposite if you are not.

Leads
You should be tracking click-throughs to your site from social media sites, as well as your “likes”, follows, etc. Also try to be aware of and track any referrals that are sent your way from your existing social media contacts.

Engagement Duration
How much time are your “friends” spending on your Facebook page or using your Facebook app? (you do have one don’t you?) This “stickiness” factor should be improving over time, not staying stagnant or declining.

Bounce Rate
When folks click through from a social media site to your website, are they leaving again right away or do they hang out and see what you have going on there? If they aren’t spending time on your site once they get there, you need to evaluate whether or not your site has relevant, fresh content. The social sites can help get people to your site, but it needs to be a fun or interesting place to be, or they will get out of there like they just walked into the wrong restroom.

Network and Membership Size
For this you want to count the people that actively engage. There are lots of people who will like, follow, friend, or whatever your social presence and then they never mess with it again. You want to know how many are actually reading your posts, commenting, sharing, etc. This number should be growing, as well as the number of new people joining the fun.

Activity Ratio
This is very similar to the previous metric, but it is about the ratio of active to inactive network members instead of just the growth numbers. This ratio should also ideally tilt more and more into the active side as you go along to consider your activity a success.

Conversions
This is big. Business wise this is the most important metric here. You ultimately want to convert your network members into sales, subscriptions, or anything else that can be monetized in one way or another. You are a business, right? Track this very closely and then work on increasing the other metrics with the goal of pushing them into this one.

Mentions
Tracking your mentions on different social sites is one of the best ways to see how pervasive your brand is on the scene. This includes the good and the bad mentions. The good will tell you what you are doing right and how well you are doing it. The bad mentions tell you where you need to improve.

Loyalty
Hand in hand with other metrics, it is important to track how many times your content and links are being shared, if you are getting evangelized by your promoters, and how often they do these things.

The Viral Factor
Extended networks also need to be monitored. In other words, when one of your network members shares a link or post from you to one of their friends that is not on your network, are they resharing it with their friends, and so on. The further you can reach, the better.

Blog Comments
You need a blog. It keeps the web-crawling robots tracking your site and keeps you in thee search results. You also need to have a comments section after each post. You need to reply to comments.  Then you need to track these comments, shares of the blog posts, etc. You also need to make sure that you have buttons by the posts that people can click on to share them on the social sites.

Tracking your social media engagement is just as important as actually being on the social sites. Don’t waste time on the sites if you aren’t going to measure the results. Of course, choosing to abstain from Facebook, Twitter, and the others is as good as hanging out the “closed ” sign for good.

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?

A CSV file is a simple text format commonly used for database tables. Each record in a table is one line of text with each value separated by a comma with no space.

Note: While most text editors, office applications, and database management systems support CSV format, they may not export correct character renderings in a CSV. For instance, depending on a system’s regional settings, Microsoft Excel may use a semicolon as a separator instead of a comma. Be sure to check your application’s defaults before exporting to CSV format. Be sure to use the following date format for the SendDate column: yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm. E.g. 2012-02-24 23:59 for your CSV file.

You can follow the steps below to import the messages using Send Social Media’s message importer:

1) Click on Add/Edit Services > Import.

2) Under CSV importers, click “Add” next to Message Importer.

3) Click “Browse” and select your CSV file.

4) Note that Send Social Media accepts a specific CSV file format as seen below. The column headers “Message”, “Subject” and “SendDate” must be included.

5) Select the group that you want these messages to be distributed to. A group can consist of multiple social network profiles, email address, blogs etc.