Manage Multiple Social Media Campaigns

Quick and Easy Ways to Manage Multiple Social Media Campaigns

Social media campaigns tend to grow over time. You start with a presence on Facebook. Then you realize you need a Twitter account. Then along comes Pinterest, and suddenly you’re devising pinboards and optimizing website images for repinning. Oh, and there’s also Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, and whatever new social media sprang into existence as I typed this sentence.

Keeping your various social media profile voices consistent and inter-related can easily become a time-sink. Fortunately, a host of services are available to help you keep your campaign on track. Some of these services are free, while others charge small monthly subscriptions. All are excellent time-savers.

Scheduling Posts

Let’s say you spent the day devising tweets for a pool fence company. You’ve got thirty witty, retweetable posts (is “retweetable” a word? Because it totally should be). Now, you could post all these tweets manually, over the course of the next two weeks, but why waste time better spent on furthering your social media campaign?

Enter the auto responders. You need tools, tools I say! Services such as FutureTweet, HootSuite, Pluggio and SocialOomph allow you to schedule when your Twitter feed updates. Of the auto responders, HootSuite is probably the most versatile, allowing you to access Facebook as well as Twitter from its dashboard.

While we’re focused on Twitter, here are a couple of other helpful tools. TweetDeck allows you to monitor multiple Twitter accounts from a single dashboard. And the ever-useful Bitly automatically shortens URLs for use in Tweets.

One-Click Postings

Often a social media campaign needs to send an identical message to all its social media profiles. Again, manually submitting each post is a time-consuming pain.

Instead, use services such as OnlyWire and Seesmic Ping. Both services allow users to post identical messages to multiple platforms with a single mouse click.

Email Assistance

Somewhere in between writing posts, responding to followers, and running analytics, you probably need to check your email. Digsby, Netvibes and similar services offer a one-stop dashboard for social networking, instant messages and email.

Taking a slightly different approach, NutshellMail records screenshots of your social media sites as they update, periodically emailing updates to you. The emails allow you to quickly scan over multiple sites for an overall view of user activity. You schedule when the service sends updates.

Tracking Your Progress

Running analytics and monitoring social media activity play important roles in your campaign. Simplify your life with services like SocialReport, SproutSocial and TwentyFeet. These services allow you to calculate social media return on investment and compare the performance of different platforms.

Even with accurate analytics, determining your overall online presence can be difficult. Get some help with apps designed to rank your levels of activity and online engagement. Empire Avenue, Klout and PeerIndex all provide valuable insights in your online standing, who you influence, and who influences you.

Adrienne Erin is a social media marketer who loves to share the tips she’s picked up over years spent growing with the industry.