Becoming More Productive on Social Media - Part Two

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.