This is a guest post written by my friend and colleague, David C. Baker. He speaks to, writes for, and consults with the marketing industry via ReCourses, Inc. He has worked with more than 650 firms individually and thousands of people have been through his seminars, such as Recourse’s New Business Summit held annually in Nashville, TN.
David owns RockBench Publishing Corp., a traditional and electronic publisher of courageous thought leadership content. He is the author of two RockBench books: Managing (Right) for the First Time, available via Amazon; and Financial Management of a Marketing Firm, available at ReCourses.
In a recent conversation that I had with author Tim Williams, he said that David Baker is one of the brightest minds in the advertising industry. No surprise to learn that David is a member of Mensa, a roundtable society comprised of the top 2% of individuals in the world in terms of intelligence.
David is not only a brilliant thought leader to this industry, he is also a former professional photographer, seminary graduate, a licensed helicopter and airplane pilot and motorcycle enthusiast.
I invited David to share a guest post as a way of introducing him to you. He will be a helpful resource for your agency and will constantly challenge your thinking.
All along, social media “experts” have insisted, without exception, that the only social media strategy that’s successful is one that involves a significant amount of engagement with your followers, on whatever platform.
I disagree, for two reasons. First, I don’t possibly have the time for that. Second, I don’t believe anybody else that follows the stream will find that interaction helpful, often unfollowing because of the clutter.
So I told myself that I needed a social media presence, but if it required those “expert” recommendations I wouldn’t do it. Instead, I use social media primarily as a publishing platform. I do engage with comments from time to time, but very sporadically. If you are interested in a similar and very simple strategy, here is how you can do it.
Get a free BufferApp.com account and link these various profiles to it: FaceBook business page, FaceBook personal page (if you are treating it like a business one), Linkedin, Twitter, and App.net (the new Twitter). Post 4-5x/day to all accounts. You can look at my feeds to see the kinds of things I’m talking about, though of course yours will be different. This should happen on weekends, too, which is a time of very high engagement.
Get a free Twylah.com account, ask them to customize your page like mine, adjust your domain “A” records (tweets.recourses.com), and use it to send PowerTweets, which allow more than the normal 140 characters…and generate lots more engagement as your website gets credit for that traffic.
Get a free Tweriod.com account, after you’ve been doing this awhile, and have it analyze the peak engagement times on each platform. From there, you press a button and it builds the schedule in Buffer automatically, modifying what you have put in manually.
After you’ve built up a significant amount of contact, get a free TweetLibrary account to download all your postings to use as later content ideas.
Get your own shortener (sedo.com is the best place to do an advanced search) like mine (is.to), build it into your free bit.ly account and it’ll be a better branding statement.
Get a free sayonara account and find out who and when you are followed by individuals, and note the post they say right before initiating the action. That will give you a feel for what followers aren’t interested in so that you can adjust your content.
For really advanced interaction with Twitter influences, for instance, consider a MuckRack Pro account.
Social media is still nascent and of unmeasured value. It should be an integral part of your marketing plan, though, and will lead results, albeit not immediate.
If you would like a piece of David’s mind, visit his Recourses website and Recourses Blog. You can follow him on Twitter @Recourses. Learn more about David here: www.davidcbaker.com.
Additional articles by David Baker that may be of interest:
Great post to read! One point about social media presence is that facebook Page for businesses (formerly known as a fan page) enables you to interact with prospective clients or customers in ways similar to interaction on your website.