Social media has become an integral part of the work that many agencies do. One of the challenges that agencies often face as they grow is being able to keep up with posting for all clients across multiple platforms. Because this is something that’s obviously too time-consuming to manage manually and is actually too demanding for many social media tools, it’s vital to find a tool that’s built for the specific needs of an agency. Here are the types of features that are essential for a social media management tool used by agencies:

Bulk Scheduling

Not having this feature is a deal breaker. When you want to work on social media content for a client, it’s important for a member of your team to be able to sit down and fill up a queue with lots of posts. Not only is this essential for the sake of efficiency, but it’s also very important for being able to take a strategic approach to social media posting. By choosing a tool that makes it a breeze to queue up plenty of posts, an agency will be able to keep the social profiles active for all its clients without feeling constantly overwhelmed.

Email Integration

Although social media has become an absolutely essential part of online marketing, it hasn’t eliminated email. In fact, as more activity has moved out of people’s inboxes, being able to communicate through this channel is arguably more valuable than ever. That’s why the best agencies know that integrating email into the marketing efforts for their clients is a must. With the right tool, you can easily manage this type of activity. Having this ability is great for using social media as a lead generation tool and then converting those leads into customers.

Ability to Respond

Regardless of the specific platform, social media activity is driven by engagement. If people try to communicate with a profile and never get a response, they’re going to lose interest. Since many agencies handle this type of interaction for their clients, having a tool that pulls all messages into one location and then makes it easy to respond is incredibly useful.

Detailed Analytics

Without analytics, it’s very difficult to know what’s working and what isn’t working as well. With a social media management tool that offers detailed analytics, you’ll be able to use this data for the agency, as well as easily share it with clients on a regular basis.

If you want a social media management tool that you can count on to handle all of your agency’s daily needs, be sure to take a product tour of Send Social Media.

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?

One of our most popular new features on Send Social Media, is the ability to resell and offer your own version of our social media marketing platform to your clients.

With our white label social media tool, you have the option to manage social media on behalf of your clients, or train them up and allow them to log in themselves and manage their own social media accounts.  Send Social Media is a great tool to help implement a social media strategy for your customers. Why Send Social Media is the perfect Social Media Management Tool for Agencies:

The way the white label site works is as follows:

• We create and host a completely re-branded site for your business/agency – with your own logo, look-and-feel – running on your own website domain, but hosted on our servers.
• We give you a control panel where you can administer your site. From here, you can manage your existing clients and create new logins for your clients.
• Your clients can log in to your white label site themselves and view reports, send social media posts, track mentions etc – or you have the option to manage things for them from your control panel.
• There is a one-off setup fee for the white-label site which includes re-branding and indefinite hosting on our servers.

For more information be sure to contact us

So your company is on Facebook and Twitter and you are sending out posts and Tweets like there is no tomorrow. What are you getting for the effort? Do you know? If you don’t know, then you are burning productivity like my first car burned oil. Measuring social media ROI is just as important as any other area of your business. Some business owners are still unsure as to what they are measuring, however. That’s why we here at Send Social Media are giving you the gift of information with this post. Here are 10 Social Media ROI Metrics your Company Should Monitor:

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.

Social Media Motivational Thought of the day!

One of the most common questions businesses have about social media is how they can produce interesting content that’s relevant to what they do and the audience they want to reach. While everyone knows that things like cat pictures perform really well on social media, that’s not content that’s going to be compatible with most businesses. However, that doesn’t mean that businesses won’t be able to produce great social media content. Regardless of the specific industry, there are always ways to come up with content that’s useful and interesting.

To help you get started, let’s take a look at some different ways your business can create social media content that will be well-received:

Use Blogging as the Foundation

If your business is in the early stages of social media marketing, the best place to begin producing content is your blog. The reason this is a good starting point is it provides an easy way to start creating content that can be shared through social media and then bring visitors back to your website. And if you’re worried that your business doesn’t have anything to write about, think about all the questions you receive from potential and current customers. By turning those topics into blog posts, you’ll start plenty of social media discussions, which can then yield additional topics that will make great posts.

Expand on Popular Blog Posts

Because writing a blog post is easier than creating an infographic or producing video content, blogging is a great way to test different ideas. Then when a post does perform really well, you can take the time to expand it into a richer format. By using this strategy, you’ll be able to expand your content into all kind of mediums. Fun facts, case studies, infographics, videos and even e-books are all types of content that can gain a lot of momentum through social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

Take the Guesswork Out of Producing Great Social Media Content

Following everything we covered above is the best way to start producing great content for your company’s social media channels. While the above strategy will help you come up with interesting pieces, some will perform better than others. However, that doesn’t mean that you’ll have to continue guessing

The easiest way to take the guesswork out of producing content that’s going to perform great is by using the Send Social Media Dashboard. Because our dashboard makes it extremely easy to see all your social media statistics in one place, you can let real data guide your content efforts. Thanks to our easy monitoring, your team will know exactly what kind of content they should focus on producing for your target audience.

Login at: http://dashboard.sendsocialmedia.com/mobile.

You will now also be notified about your new mobile app on the login page at http://dashboard.sendsocialmedia.com/login and mobile visitors will be directed there automatically.

• Manage your Priority Inbox and Streams
• Reply to important posts, mentions and comments on the go.
• Read and respond to mentions
• Read and respond to mentions of your social media monitoring terms or keywords.
• Update all your social networks at once
• Publish content to any of the services linked to your Send Social Media account
• View campaign reports and analytics
• Access your Send Social Media reports and view statistics such as clicks, comments, fan growth and more.
• Manage your clients on the go Easily switch between clients and manage their accounts.

Send Social Media does everything Hootsuite does, but significantly better in addition to other features Hootsuite simply doesn’t offer.

1. Schedule posts to over 30+ social networks – not just 5 Schedule and posts tweets, Foursquare shouts and venue tips, LinkedIn status updates, LinkedIn Group posts, personal messages, as well as WordPress (self-hosted), WordPress.com, Blogger, Posterous and Tumblr blogs, Pinterest pins, Instagram, Flickr albums, Email Newsletters and even SMS/text messages. That’s just scratching the surface as you can add over 30+ more social networks.

2. Better Analytics, analyze every post, click, share & comment while also checking your Klout score Track just about everything including clicks, referrers, shares, comments, views and more. Track every piece of content you distribute, making it easy to measure the success of your campaigns. You can even add your Google Analytics code. Get reports on various metrics including fans/followers over time, engagement, klout, sentiment and more.

3. Better Monitoring, track and easily respond to your Yelp and City search reviews Monitor what’s being said about your brand on blogs, news, social networks and in comments. Your sentiment analysis highlights which mentions you should respond to. You can also review your latest Yelp and CitySearch reviews so you can respond right away.

4. Customer Database included letting you engage with them all easily Access all your social, email and mobile contacts in a single, unified address book. Import your contacts from all the services you use including Gmail and LinkedIn. Create profiles and groups for each contact you import, allowing you to reach them on whichever platform you choose.

5. Unlimited Collaboration Tools to manage multiple users and clients Manage accounts for multiple clients and/or contributors while creating logins allowing them to manage things themselves. Create user hierarchies and manage permissions. This is a great solution for agencies needing to manage multiple client accounts and perfect for businesses with small teams. Your users have the option to log in and manage things themselves or you can manage everything for them.

6. A better calendar style layout that actually lets you see your scheduled posts overall Have a true calendar layout to easily view all your scheduled posts for editing. Access the interactive drag-and-drop calendar to easily plan your message schedule.

7. Now you can send 160-character SMS texts to any network in the world Send customers promotional codes and announcements about deals and sales or integrate SMS into your own applications. Sending an SMS text is as simple as typing your message and deciding where to send it. Add a sign-up widget to your website to gather new mobile numbers and potential customers.

8. Manage all your social streams from a single inbox Like, Comment, Share and Delete posts in your stream from services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Easily manage your Twitter stream, lists, search terms and followers. View detailed information about anyone on Twitter, including Klout scores and influencers. Keep track of mentions, search terms, retweets and more.

9. All the Twitter Features you love and more! Manage and track all your Twitter profiles in one place. Read and respond to your Twitter stream in real-time or schedule tweets to go out later. Setup auto-responders, auto-follow and unfollow keyword targeted users and more

When Apple was starting to gain momentum as a company, one of the main criticisms it faced was that there weren’t enough offerings for businesses. While Apple had all sorts of awesome programs for creative individuals, their software solutions for business settings weren’t nearly as robust. However, as Apple has continued to grow and has successfully expanded into new markets, this has been something they’ve directly addressed. Not only has the company itself prioritized multiple business initiatives, but the developer-driven nature of the iOS ecosystem means that numerous iPhone and iPad apps have been developed specifically for businesses to use.

One of the great things about the iOS ecosystem empowering developers outside of Apple to create apps is that these talented individuals and teams are able to create apps for all kinds of purposes. In addition to general business apps, many apps have been created for specific industries. For example, as iPads have continued to become more popular in the medical field, plenty of app developers have used their domain expertise to develop apps that are very useful for medical professionals like nurses and doctors.

Since there’s no question that there are many apps which can help businesses be more productive and even save money, we want to bring five of the best business iOS apps to your attention:

Evernote

If you’re looking for the best way for your entire team to keep its information organized and easily shareable with each other, Evernote is the app that every member of your business should have on their iOS devices.

GoToMeeting

While most business owners have heard of this software, many aren’t aware that it’s available on iOS devices. That availability means you can stay on top of your meetings without necessarily being tied to your office all day.

Microsoft Remote Desktop

Looking for a way to access your desktop when you’re away from the office? With the Microsoft Remote Desktop, you can quickly access your desktop computer from your iPad or even your iPhone. This can be a lifesaver when you find yourself in need of a file or program that hasn’t been put in the cloud yet.

Square

If your business is tired of paying a small fortune to process credit card payments, you should look into Square. By attaching a simple dongle to an iPhone or iPad, Square provides a way to securely process payments for a much smaller fee than traditional processors.

Microsoft Office

Although there was a time when Apple fans would have never imagined using a Microsoft product, those days are long gone. Because Microsoft is still the leader in word processing and spreadsheets, it’s great that a very compelling Microsoft Office experience is available on iOS.

By taking advantage of all the features offered by quality iPhone and iPad apps, businesses can find new ways to work which increase their overall efficiency.