By This is the 5th and final post of a series I have written providing some help and advice to answer the question: “How much will social media cost me?” Make sure you read the full series – ‘Social Investment’.
Social media is not a ‘set and forget’ environment. It is highly charged with conversation and action. So, while I do advocate scheduling content (which has already been thought-through and planned) – it is still important that you pay attention too. This means you need to be live on the platforms each day to make sure you are responding to people and also being seen to be sharing other people’s content.
For bigger businesses, they may well be using social media as a serious customer service and support tool. Heck, most businesses should be viewing it as that too – but more often than not they don’t. I sincerely hope that you will at least view it as this for your business. This puts the emphasis on you and/or your team to answer questions, refer people to helpful resources or just generally be responsive, helpful and add value where you can.
Who is involved in being proactive
I would hope this would be you, your marketing resource or your social media manager. Your agency support can do some of this to a degree, but we (as a rule) at our agency – only help cover some of the proactive activity.
We train our clients on how to manage their online communities themselves, but we do provide low level support (work that is helping with sharing content, responding to easy comments, following new people/brands and adding to lists, etc).
Some of the tasks involved in this function
This is not an exhaustive list as it will vary business to business. I know some businesses who spend a lot of time on this each day as its where their audiences communicates the most with them – and by being more proactive, they end up deriving a lot of business from doing it.
Being proactive means doing the following:
- Responding: liking, replying, commenting on people’s interaction on your own content
- Making notes on followers (for customer relationship management, tagging advocates and influencers) or adding them to lists for future use
- Sharing: selecting the kind of content that your followers will like and sharing it with them
- Conversation: seeking to add to conversations that you are an expert in (following hashtags or keyword phrase searches)
- Co-ordinating: looking at what topics are trending and matching that with content you already have and could possibly share to be seen while its trending
Investment of time and money
This definitely depends on how big your community is, what kind of business you are in and what your social media objectives are. You will need to evaluate how much time is spent on this. You need to be doing at least 30 to 45 mins a day (spread out over the whole day if you can) – but at the very very least 15mins – so you are not missing anything.
As an agency, we only provide a lite community management service – so we tend to only focus on tasks number (3) and (5) – with some parameters from the client and of course a very healthy understanding of the business and their social media strategy. We would charge between £200 and £300+VAT per month which would cover lite coverage on working days of the week.
Do you need help in being more proactive with your audience or community? Not sure where to make the difference? Book a free Discovery Call with me to see if we can work together (check my diary here).
Remember to read the first four blog posts in this Social Investment series:
“Social Media Investment”(#1) | “Invest in a Strategy” (#2)
“Content Creation Sweat” (#3) | “Skilled Social Media Admin” (#4)
