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According to this website, there are 119 sleeps until Christmas!!

That's only 17 weeks!

Which means that all you eTailers have even less time to prepare your eStore for the Christmas/Holiday Sale Rush!

The time to start planning is NOW!

There are promotions to decide, marketing campaigns to prepare, and don't even get me started on which wrapping paper to use this year.

We've put together a nice check-list to help you to prepare for your best Christmas Season yet.

#1: Review Last Year

The very first thing you'll want to do is to review the performance of last year's sale.

Undoubtedly, there were some parts that went very well, and other parts that fizzled for one reason or another.

Take this time to identify the positives and the negatives from last year.

Anything you did that was worth repeating, note it down and add it into your 2015 strategy. And the mistakes that you don't want to repeat, create contingency plans to ensure they don't get repeated.

Then after reviewing your own performance, the next step is to review your competitors.

Look at how they approached the silly season sale. Are there any lessons to be learnt from mistakes they made? Or some clever ideas that you can take some inspiration from?

#2: Check Your Sales Data

Have a look at your sales history for the year.

Identify your top customers, because you'll want to specifically target them to boost your sales, as well as offer them a little reward incentive to butter them up as well.

Next, identify your top selling and poorest selling products for the year, and there are two reasons for this.

The first is to help you to select the products to feature in your promotions.

The second is to help identify any possible issues for the performance of your poorest selling products. Is there a stand-out reason why these particular products aren't selling as well?

Maybe the product description isn't informative enough, or the product images need improvement.

Take this opportunity to compare your poorer selling products against your best selling products and improve the content for your poorer sellers.

#3: Review our Twelve Steps to Successful Christmas eTailing

Hopefully you're already up-to-speed with our Twelve Steps to successful Christmas eTailing from last year, and they're already a part of your strategy.

If not, be sure to read them, as they are all still very relevant.

#4: Map out your marketing strategy

Now you want to plan your strategy - the theme of your campaign, the promotions you will offer, when you will start each promotion, and how long each promotion will run for.

Christmas is about rewards and gifts, and just generally being nice, so integrate this into the theme for your campaign.

Shoppers are always looking for the discounts, but think creatively about how customers can earn them, or earn further discounts.

Create some interaction between your business and your customers.

Perhaps a competition on social media could offer a higher discount on top of a regular discount. Or offer a special discount to your Facebook followers that are the most active in your community.

Stacking promotions to encourage sales at the start of the promotion is another effective strategy, offering multiple discounts/specials at the start of the sale period that drop off as the promotion progresses.

Without a doubt, you will also want to offer Free Shipping at some point during the promotion, if not for the entire sale period. Free Shipping will is always a major part of your customer's buying decisions, and is a common sales tactic by your competitors.

#5: Map out your content strategy

It's never a bad time to review and update your content, but now is a great opportunity to give your website content a good spring clean.

You've already decided on the theme for your marketing campaign, now to plan the areas of your website that will need to be updated to reflect your theme.

You may wish to re-write your product pages to be more appropriate to the occasion/theme, or to provide better descriptions that help the customer to make a purchase.

Fresh product images are always a good idea, and can also be used to add to the feel of your theme.

Then there is the banner images on the homepage that are going to draw and direct your customers to your featured specials. What marketing message will you want to display? Which products will you feature?

If you have a Blog or News section, prepare a plan for the articles that you will publish during the campaign. Plan dates will they be published, and decide on the images that be used in the articles.

#6: Map out your e-Mail campaigns

Now that you have your marketing strategy set out, it's time to plan your e-Mail campaigns.

Following on from Step 2, we recommend making two lists of subscribers - Your best customers, and your regular subscribers.

Plan to send a campaign to each list a week before your campaign starts, another at the start of the sale, then a third campaign a week or two before the sale ends, and lastly, a final days reminder.

List which products you will include, and write the content for each campaign, and again, decide on the images that be used.

Have everything prepared so that all that remains is the create each campaign and send them.

#7: Map out your social media campaigns

As always, you need to plan social media campaigns to support your marketing and e-Mail campaigns.

Plan out the posts for each of your social media accounts, and prepare the content for each post, and brainstorm the style and message of images that will need to be produced for each post.

You may also want to launch competitions especially for your social media channels to attract your followers.

Lastly, look at utilising Facebook Ads to target your followers, or new followers.

#8: Arrange for content to be produced early

Once you have everything planned and decided, the final step is to arrange for the content you aren't able to produce to be produced for you.

You really don't want to leave this until the last minute, the earlier you can get your designer onto your banners or images, the earlier they will be ready to launch your campaign and the less rush everyone will be in later in the year.

Need some Help? If you would like some help to get your Christmas Promotion into gear, Get in Touch. Or if you have some tips of your own that you'd like to share, join us on the iASP Central Facebook Page.

Further Reading:

• 10 steps to email success at Christmas: Part One
• Celebrate Christmas in July by Preparing Your Store for the Holidays
• Everything You Need for an eCommerce Holiday Sale
• 5 Promotional Campaign Ideas to Boost Sales This Holiday Season
• Doing These 5 Things Can Help You Get More Ecommerce Sales This Holiday Season

Don't you just love SPAM e-Mail?

How much productivity is lost globally, filtering genuine e-mail from the countless, useless, unwanted and sometimes downright offensive e-Mail messages.

What frustrates us as professional web developers is that so many organisations directly invite SPAM by making one of the most common and costly mistakes: Publishing e-mail addresses on websites.

Publishing e-mail addresses on websites is the #1 way to attract SPAM.

It's that simple!
No cheats or gimmicks.
No sneaky fees or subscriptions.
Guaranteed to work every time!

Publishing your e-mail address on your website is about as clever as publishing your credit card number. It's just inviting trouble.

There are countless SPAMbots - simple computer programs that scan the Web looking for e-Mail addresses and adding them to SPAM lists or marketing databases.

And while SPAM might be just one of those things you have to deal with on the Internet, reducing the severity of the problem will always make life easier.

So how can you publish your e-Mail address without leaving it open for Spambots?

Well, there are 3 main methods:

1.) Miscellaneous Teckky Tricks

The end goal is to display an e-Mail address in a readable way to a real viewer, while hiding the e-Mail address from spambots.
To achieve this, there are a few "tricks" you can use to try to "hide" your e-Mail address.

One "trick" is to type the e-Mail address backwards, then use CSS to display it the right way.
A spambot will see 'ua.moc.sserdda@liame-my', but the reader will see 'my-email@address.com.au'.
The difficult part to this trick is correctly writing your e-Mail address backwards. Did you notice my mistake?

Another "trick" is to break up the e-Mail address with HTML code, which is then hidden using CSS to display the e-Mail address correctly.

And yet another "trick" is to replace the @'s and .'s in an e-Mail address with AT or DOT.
Because nothing says "professional" like 'my-email AT address DOT com DOT au'.

These tricks have been around for centuries however (in Internet time), and spambot developers have become wise to them.
They will easily unpick your "trick" and add you to their spam list.

2.) e-Mail Address Obfuscator

An e-Mail obfuscator is a small javascript that adds your e-Mail address to the page after it has loaded, or unjumbles your e-Mail address so that appears jumbled to spambots but becomes readable when the page is loaded.

Like the "tricks" above, however, this method is becoming outdated as well.

Spambot developers are learning how to find if an obfuscator is being used, and how to get around them.
This means that obfuscators need to be adjusted semi-regularly to change how they alter an e-Mail address so it doesn't become predictable.

And now with Google's ability to execute javascript to index websites better, you can bet that it won't be long before spambots can do the same thing.

3.) A Contact form

Really, THE ONLY WAY to save you from the need to publish your e-Mail address on the Web while still allowing people to contact you by e-Mail is to use a Contact form.

The first two methods still leave your e-Mail address wide open for nefarious types to find with a little bit of effort.
A contact form removes the need to publish an e-Mail address entirely, making it much more difficult to find.

Using a contact form also allows comes with some advantages for analytics and visitor tracking as well (if you're into that kind of thing).

Conclusion

While just publishing a link to your e-Mail address may save you some time and appear to be more aesthetic.
It is nothing compared to the pain of deleting SPAM e-Mail every morning after your e-Mail address ends up on SPAM lists around the globe.

All iASP powered websites come standard with a Contact form module, and customised versions are one of many options available.

If you're unsure of how to add a Contact form to your iASP powered website, or you'd like some advice about publishing an e-Mail address, Get in Touch.

Resources:

• Warning: don't publish your email address!
• Avoiding Spam When Posting an Email Address

What's your Opinion? Do you proudly publish your e-Mail address in the open? Let's discuss on our iASP Central Facebook Page, or Get in Touch.

Since our beginnings as Canberra based Internet Service Provider ACTWEB.NET in the 1990's, we've learned that Domain Name related issues are one of the most common causes of significant service issues on the Internet.

Sadly we've also seen many scams and cons that take advantage of unsuspecting Domain Name owners.

In this article we highlight the most common Domain Name related scams and list our top tactics to help make managing your Domain Names a breeze and avoid falling victim to the scammers.

Common Domain Name Related Scams

There are several different types of common Domain Name related scams.

Many involve a variation on the theme of sending Domain Name owners what appears at a glance to be a legitimate invoice for Domain Name Registration renewal.

The fake Domain Name Registration renewal scams usually fall into one of three categories:

• 1: An invoice from a source claiming to be the Domain Registrar for a real Domain Name that is in fact registered with another Domain Registrar
• 2: An invoice for a different version of a real Domain Name. Either closely related spelling i.e. if the real domain is abc.com the invoice might be for acb.com or for an entirely different extension of the domain name i.e. abc.net
• 3: An invoice for a totally unrelated service that is carefully worded to mimic the appearance of a legitimate Domain Name Registration renewal, such as the one pictured on this page.

The image on this page relates to a scam we received recently from http://www.trafficdomainer.com.

The scam relates to an actual Domain Name we owned at the time: iaspestore.com.

The scam message arrived via e-mail within days of the actual registration renewal date of the Domain Name.

The sender of the e-mail was marked as "Domain Service", and the subject was "iaspestore.com notice".

The notice was properly addressed and contained the words at the top: ATTENTION: IMPORTANT NOTICE.

Of course, when you read the fine print, they are actually selling seo domain name registration - whatever that is - apparently a totally unrelated service that the message later warns "failure to complete...may make it difficult for customers to find you on the web".

Which is 100% BS!

While most of the Domain Name registration scams arrive via e-mail, some arrive in the form of physical mail.

We also recently received a very similar scam to the one above via the post - supposedly from an Australian based organisation, whom we reported to Justice Victoria.

Domain Name scams that originate overseas can contain give-aways in the form of poor spelling and grammar, but those sent by Australian based organisations can be harder to tell apart from the real thing.

What makes some of these scams so successful is they not only appear to come from Australian based organisations, but they contain accurate Domain Name owner contact information and are often well timed to coincide with the actual Domain Name registration renewal date.

The good news is that when armed with just a little information about your Domain Names, even the most official looking scams become much easier to spot.

Our Top 5 Tips to Avoid Domain Name Scams

Tip 1:

When you register a Domain Name create a calendar reminder to re-new the domain name 1 month before the due date. Be sure to also make a note of the Domain Name Registrar you used to register the domain name.

Tip 2:

If you have multiple Domain Names registered via different Domain Registrars or contained in multiple accounts a single Domain Registrar, consolidate all the Domains into a single account for easy management.

Provided all your Domain Name contact details are current, transferring Domains Names between Registrars and Registrar Accounts is a very straight forward process.

Tip 3:

Make sure the contact details, especially the Registrant e-mail address (where renewal notices are sent), associated with all your Domain Names is current.

Tip 4:

If you buy or sell any type of operation where Domain Names are involved be sure to provide or request a letter signed by both buyer and seller addressed to the relevant Domain Registrar on the official letter head of the seller explaining that transfer of ownership has occurred.

Be sure to follow up with the relevant Domain Name Registrar until the Whois Registry is updated with the new Domain Name ownership details.

Tip 5:

When a Domain Name Registration renewal notice arrives, don't ignore it - check it against your list of registered Domain Names - does it come from the actual Registrar of a Domain Name that you are expecting to expire?. One of the consequences of the prevalence of Domain Name related scams is that legitimate renewal notices often go ignored. This year alone three of our clients have experienced the inconvenience of website and e-mail services going off-line for extended periods because they ignored legitimate Domain Name Registration renewal notices.

Summary

If you select a reputable Domain Name Registrar and follow the advice outlined in our 5 tips above you'll be a long way in front of most of the current Domain Name scams you're likely to encounter.

Unfortunately, clever new scams surface from time to time, so keep an eye on the Australian Government's SCAMWATCH website and other sites such as your local State based Australian Consumer Affairs website.

If you're unlucky enough to fall victim to a Domain Name related or any form of scam please don't be embarrassed and report the matter to the relevant authorities, that way other potential victims can be educated and warned of the dangers.

Not long ago, I started a journey to become more productive on social media.

If you've just joined me, you can read Becoming More Productive on Social Media - Part One, and Becoming More Productive on Social Media - Part Two.

To quickly bring you up to speed, the QuickSprout Blog posted an infographic in May titled "How to Be More Productive on Social Media".

The infographic was designed to help social media community managers become more productive.

As a personal exercise, I am following the suggestions in the infographic to see what result, if any, it has on our iASP Central social media profiles.

To refresh your memories, the infographic split the daily tasks of a social media manager into 3 groups: Content, Community Management and Growth.

Content includes curating, crafting, posting and scheduling content for social media.
Community Management includes responding, listening, engaging and helping.
Growth includes measuring, analysing, planning and experimenting.

In Part I, I followed the Content group suggestions, which resulted in our content collecting activities being made easier and our content scheduling processes a lot more streamlined.

And in Part II, I followed the Community Management group suggestions, which has seen the establishment of automated monitoring that gathers all mentions of our brand name across the Internet, which has in turn streamlined and simplified and our social media engagement processes.

For the last leg of the journey, I'm going through the Growth related suggestions.

The infographic lists Tools and Steps to help with the daily growth management tasks.

The Tools:

• Twitter Analytics
• Facebook Insights
• SumAll
• Bit.ly
• Google Spreadsheets
• Buffer / Hootsuite

The Steps:

1. Figure out the crucial metrics
2. Log in to the various places where you collect data on your social media marketing.
3. Put your top performing content and metrics into a spreadsheet, so you have one place to view everything.
4. Analyse the top performing content to determine what's working so you can further test based on the following elements:
   1. Post Type (image, link, video, status updated, etc.)
   2. Post Timing (over a long period of time)
   3. Post Content (commonly used words, voicing, emotion, etc.)
   4. Post Formatting (link placement, hashtag usage, etc.)
5. Take the common factors that you found from your popular posts, and integrate them into the future posts and tests.

Wow, this last leg looks to be a doozy. Let's get going.

Figure out the crucial metrics

Second only in importance to simply being on social media, is tracking your performance to gain insight.

Before you can start tracking your performance, you need to map out what to measure, and how.

The easiest way to decide what to measure is to ask yourself: What am I hoping to achieve from social media engagement?

At iASP Central, our current social media goals include encouraging our clients to monitor and participate in our social media community, which is aimed at website owners who share our passion for eCommerce, as well as to create a go-to resource to help our clients grow their on-line businesses.

Therefore, at this stage of the plan, apart from an interest in our audience demographics, one of our primary interests is in the level of engagement we are achieving.

We want to measure impressions (the number of people that saw the post/tweet), engagement (the total number of likes/favourites, shares/re-tweets, or comments/mentions for a post/tweet), engagement rate (individual engagement compared to our overall community size), and audience growth rate (to measure how fast our community is growing).

These metrics give us an idea of how well our content is performing, and how relevant it is to our audience.

It's worth noting that our key metrics are sure to change in the future. As our community grows and we'll look to achieve new goals from our social media activity.

Log in to the various places where you collect data on your social media marketing.

There are numerous websites and services that you could use to collect data for your social media metrics.

The infographic lists a few good examples.

The social media platforms all provide some analytics, in fact the Insights tab of your Facebook page and the Twitter equivalent give most of the analytics you could ever need.

Swayy, Buffer (which we now use courtesy of this exercise) and Hootsuite (we've been a Hootsuite Enterprise Partner for a couple of years now) also provide analytics of the social media accounts you set up in them, although the analytics they offer are more aligned to the content that is shared directly via these tools.

The infographic also lists a service called SumAll.

SumAll is a social media analytics and business dashboard. It's a free service - apart from their reporting tools, which attract a cost.

Without hesitation, I sign up and begin connecting all our social media accounts.

SumAll looks to be huge. You can even connect it to other platforms, such as Google Analytics, Shopify, WordPress, ZenDesk, even FitBit.

If ever there was a place to be overwhelmed with data, SumAll looks to be the place.

After setting everything up, I have a long list of statistics for our Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts.

So I now have a short list of websites giving me analytics data for our social media accounts.

Put your top performing content and metrics into a spreadsheet

Now for the really fun part.

To start, I'll add our last 5 Facebook and Twitter posts, and list the number of views/impressions, likes/favourites, shares/retweets each post received over that time.

I get this data very easily from our Buffer dashboard. I then compare it to the statistics on our Facebook Insights page, and Twitter Analytics page.

The numbers for our Facebook posts are fairly similar, but I can see that the statistics for our Twitter post impressions are a little off.

I'll need to look into this a little later on, but for now, onto the next step!

Analyse the top performing content and find what's working

In this step, the infographic is suggesting that I look at the characteristics of each post, to try to identify the types of content that our audience engage with the most (or to put it another way, enjoy the most).

Of the posts that I listed, two were links to our blog articles, two were shared images, and one was a shout-out link.

The two posts for our blog articles had the most engagement overall, followed by the shout-out, and then our Friday Funny posts are receiving the least engagement.

Because I have only just set up our social media accounts into the analytics dashboards, they don't have a lot of historical data to show me yet.

However, if I look at our top tweets in Twitter Analytics, as well as our top Liked posts in Facebook Insights, I can confirm that our blog posts are our top performing posts.

Our shout-out posts get more engagement on Twitter than they do on Facebook, but our Friday Funny posts get more engagement on Facebook than they do on Twitter. 

That's an interesting insight. Which leads me into the very last step of my journey...

Take the common factors that you found from your popular posts, and integrate them into the future posts and tests

In discovering that our Friday Funny posts aren't getting much engagement on Twitter, it is now time to start experimenting.

I know that our posts are always scheduled to be published at the same time, every Friday.

So as a test to see if I can improve that engagement on Twitter, I'll schedule them to post at a different time. I'll try this new time for a month, and then switch back. Over time, I can compare the different times to see if there is a noticeable difference either way.

An alternative test would be to drop the Friday Funny posts from Twitter, and try something different for our regular Friday posts.

And although our blog posts are receiving the most engagement, again I can test out different posting times to see if we get a greater engagement by sharing them when more of our audience will receive them.

I really have jumped into the rabbit's hole now.

The End

At last, I have arrived at my destination.

At the end of the final leg on my journey to becoming more productive on social media, I have:

• Determined and documented the metrics that I want to track and measure from our social media engagement.
• Gathered a number of analytics sources I will use to collect our social media data.
• Created a spreadsheet that I will use to manage our social media data.
• Identified our top performing posts on social media.
• Identified some common traits amongst our top performing posts that I can integrate into future posts.

Having embarked on this journey, I'm now a little older, a little wiser; and I can definitely say that I am now more productive on social media.

A thank you to QuickSprout for the inspiration and guidance.

This journey is a worthwhile effort for anyone who is using social media for their business, regardless of the level of your social media presence.

If for no other reason, you will end up with a pocket full of tools and a semi-automated, streamlined process to make managing your social media voice much easier.

You will transform yourself from the chaotic "just-post-it-now" type, to the "its-scheduled-to-go-next-week" type almost over night. And you should also find the quality of your posts increase as well.

I will do a follow up article in a few months to have a look at just how more productive I have become, and how much of an improvement it has made to our social media efforts, to make sure I don't just have the appearance of being more productive.

One Last Part

One last thing I would like to mention.

The infographic has some advice at the very end for the super busy and those that want to maximise their time on social media.

Using just Feedly, Buffer, and the social media sites themselves, it suggests the following:

1. Start by re-sharing your most popular content.
2. Visit your most-trusted content sources. (add them to Feedly if you haven't).
3. Use the management tool to clean up all of your queued content.
4. Respond to and engage with all the notifications in the social channels directly.

Just reading this part, I can see that these steps listed are fairly similar to how I was managing our social media before completing this three part journey.

Hopefully I have moved beyond this now, but it is good to know that I was already heading on something of the right track beforehand (according to the professionals anyway).

This last piece of advice is great for the social media managers who aren't interested in the numbers as yet, and are purely focused on gathering, managing and sharing content to first establish their own social media audience and community.

I hope you enjoyed following this journey. If you too have taken the journey to becoming more productive on social media, I'd love to hear from you. Or if you would like to discuss my journey with me, feel free to hit me up on our iASP Central Facebook Page, or Get in Touch.

Last week I started a journey to become more productive on social media. If you've just joined me, you should read Becoming More Productive on Social Media - Part One too.

To bring you up to speed, the QuickSprout Blog posted an infographic back in May, 2015, titled "How to Be More Productive on Social Media".

The infographic was created to help the reader cut back on the number of hours they spend on social sites, and teach them how to be more productive on the social web.

As a personal exercise, I am following the suggestions in the infographic to see what result, if any, it has on our iASP Central social media profiles.

To refresh your memories, the infographic split the daily tasks of a social media manager into 3 groups: Content, Community Management and Growth.

Content includes curating, crafting, posting and scheduling content for social media.
Community Management includes responding, listening, engaging and helping.
Growth includes measuring, analyzing(sic), planning and experimenting.

In the previous article, I followed the Content group suggestions, and resulted in our content collecting activities being made easier and our content scheduling processes a lot more streamlined.

For this second leg of the journey, I'm going through the Community Management group suggestions.

The infographic lists Tools and Steps to help with the daily community management tasks.

The Tools:

• Mention
• Commun.it
• Manage
  
• Flitter
  
• e-Mail notifications

The Steps:

1. Reply (or schedule the reply) to all mentions of your name/brand across the Internet using a tool called Mention.
2. Double check the notifications section inside all your social media channels for missed interactions.
3. After addressing the mentions, start engaging.
   1. Respond to the post comments.
   2. Respond to any direct mentions.
   3. Answer any questions involving your product.
   4. Answer questions about your niche and industry with the use of Hashtags.
   5. Engage with your customers or influencers.

So here we go, onto the second leg of our journey...

Step 1: Reply to all mentions of your name/brand across the Internet using Mention.

Mention positions itself as a real-time media monitoring application.

You can sign up on the website for a 14 day trial, after which, you can upgrade, or as the website says you can fall back to their free account, which allows you to manage one alert.

After signing up, the next step is to create an alert.

An alert will collect all mentions containing a keyword, typically your business name. If you go into the advanced settings however, you can expand on this to include variants or other keywords, up to a maximum of five.

After creating your alert, you next manage your sources and languages. In most cases you would select All Sources, and we'll just monitor the English Language for now.

The last step is to integrate your social media profiles and website.

At this step, I have trouble. I can't finish the process. I have no idea why, as I was able to link our Twitter and Facebook profiles successfully. It seems to be an issue with our website.

After a little investigative playing, I find that it is adding our website as a keyword in the alert step. Because I had already added 5 keywords, after adding the website as a keyword, I was over the limit. A bit of poor usability feedback there...so I remove a keyword, and shabang, I can complete the set up process.

Now I'm taken to more steps: to invite users, set up access to additional devices and platforms (skip and skip), and finally I get to have a look at my alert results.

Straight away we have 6 mentions listed, although, all but one are from our own Twitter account. The settings for our account seem to indicate that our own social media mentions (our own posts, tweets, etc) will be ignored, but they are showing up anyway. I think I'll need to leave this for a few days to process and settle itself down.

The next step in the infographic is to reply to all mentions of our name or brand.

There is only one, a blog which gathers and lists articles about social media, that has included my first article (!!). So I set up a reply to thank them for including our article. So simple.

Now that that's done, let's move on to the next step.

Step 2: Double check the notifications section inside all your social media channels for missed interactions.

I check our Facebook and Twitter accounts for missed interactions, and aside from messages asking if we want to buy likes (which we aren't into), there are none.

That was an easy step, though hopefully you'll have more interactions to reply to when you do this for yourself.

Step 3: Start engaging

Now that I have everything set up, engagement should be a lot easier.

I'll continue to monitor my alert results on Mention. But for now, I have nothing to engage with. So I've reached the end of the second leg.

That was all relatively simple.

Summary

At the end of the second leg of the journey to becoming more productive on social media, I have:

• Created an alert on Mention that is gathering all mentions of our brand name across the Internet.
• Replied to all recent and relevant mentions.
• Set myself up to be ready to engage future mentions.

I definitely want to do some research on social media etiquette and advice for engagement on social media.

For example, I want to know when I should favourite and when I should be replying? Should I favourite a mention? Or is it better to reply? Or do I favourite and reply and retweet every mention?

I mean, I don't want to be "that account".

I'll also take this opportunity to list some other real-time media monitoring applications, if Mention isn't your cup of tea.

Hootsuite is recommended by many, if you only want to monitor the social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc). Tweetdeck is useful for monitoring Twitter. And lastly, Google Alerts might also be useful for you.

They all work fairly similarly, gathering and displaying results of posts or tweets that mention a keyword or phrase. They're also handy to keep a finger on the pulse of particular terms, allowing you to see what other people are saying about terms relative to your industry.

I see many social media gurus using multiple monitoring applications to keep a blanket watch over the Internet. Some applications monitor particular sources and channels more effectively than others, so using more than one can ensure that you aren't missing anything.

Of course, by just keeping a regular eye on your own social media accounts, you will easily be able to monitor and engage your immediate social media interactions with your direct audience.

Many of these other applications allow you to sniff out the indirect mentions and conversations (like people discussing your brand in forums for example).

Next week, we head off on the third and final leg of the journey to becoming more productive on social media - and the topic is Growth.
Don't miss it!

If you have any questions or comments about my journey so far, hit me up on our iASP Central Facebook Page, or Get in Touch.