Take Control of Your Social Media Marketing

Lauren Owens - November 27, 2012

It would seem the business community is not using their Facebook pages effectively – or at all. A new study by Recommend.ly, a social media analytics company, notes that two-thirds of business pages are inactive. Among those, 63.9% have no cover photo, 70% are updated zero times a month, and 83.4% have never participated in a conversation.

Is your Facebook business page among the wayward majority? If so, it’s time to get your social mojo back.

The best way to do this is to change your perspective.

Social media marketing does not have to be the oft-ignored elephant in the room. And you do not need to have a staff member 100% dedicated to social tasks in order to achieve success. All you have to do is designate someone to take the reins.

One way to do this is to rotate the responsibility. If you have a staff of twelve, for example, have each person take over social media marketing for a month. To maintain consistency, ask each person to submit a content calendar for approval beforehand.

Give your staff an idea of what should be on the calendar by taking the lead.

To start, take a look at what you’re already doing that may be relevant to your Facebook fans and Twitter followers. This includes:

• Sales and promotions

• Blog posts

• New products or service lines

Then, beef up your calendar by adding:

• Quick, engaging, educational information about your products or services

• Relevant industry information

• Links to other relevant topics of interest

Once you’ve got your calendar, schedule your posts with a free tool like HootSuite, or use the Facebook scheduler.

While tools like HootSuite are great for set-it-and-forget-it social media management, it’s important to remember that social media is about engagement. Make sure whoever is managing your social media efforts builds time into their calendars to check your page for fan posts. And, when a fan leaves a post, respond to it! They don’t call it social for nothing.