Tips for Effective Social Media Management

Without a doubt social media can be very time consuming. It’s a 24/7 job. In a matter of a week you must produce relevant, quality content that is engaging to your target audience, you must monitor the news, blogs and relevant content being produced in a daily basis, respond any questions or comments made by your employees, consumers and other stakeholders, create an effective SEO online and offline strategy among many other things.

Well breath! You don’t need to feel overwhelmed. You’re are not the first one to think this is actually “mission impossible.” Today I’ll give you some tips to be more effective at managing your social media accounts and in the way regain your life. Believe me I do want you to share with your family, walk the dog and most importantly get a good night sleep.

4 Tips for Effective Social Media Management

1. Focus on your goal:

Your social media goal should be aligned to your business goals. Ask yourself: Why do you want to use social media for your business? What is the business purpose? Are you looking to drive revenue, increase the number of applicants to your job posts, decrease operational costs, raise awareness, improve search marketing efforts, and/or some combination of goals? Moreover, once you’ve decided your goals, it’s very important that you prioritize them. 

2. Create a Social Media Calendar:

Nowadays bloggers, publishers, businesses, and other groups are using social media calendars to control publication of content across different accounts. Use a social media calendar to stay organized, keep all your activities in one place (industry events, holidays, contests, giveaways, etc.) and deliver the right message adapted to the platform you’re using. Some tools for calendars are: Google calendar and Outlook. In the site Solo PR Pro you can find three calendar approaches that might work for you.

3. Use a Social Media Dashboard:

Having to monitor and contribute to various social media accounts can be overwhelming for anyone. I recommend you to use a social media dashboard, a tool that enables you to view all your social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) at a glance. Housing all of your social accounts on one main dashboard can not only save you time but also money. Some of the best dashboards online are HootSuite, TweetDeck and MediaFunnel.

4. Create a News Feed:

News Feeds, also known as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allow you to subscribe to your favorite websites and receive updates any time they have added new content. Through this technology you can get the latest headlines and video in one place, as soon as it’s published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from. I highly recommend you to use this, it is the most effective way to listen and monitor your customers, competition and other stakeholders online.

If you want to manage you social media presence effectively you need to be on top of interactions that come in and respond in a timely manner. However, this doesn’t mean you have to be on social media 24/7. If you put into practice these 4 tips you can be on top of interactions without checking your accounts every minute.

It’s easy! Just give it a try and let me know how it went.

Tweet Your Way Through Your Organization

In the last couple of years Twitter has become a very valuable tool for individuals and organizations all around the world. This social media platform permits you to exchange timely bits of information, whether it’s news, job posts, company information, a personal story, or a simple random thought, in a matter of seconds.

On a busy day, Twitter sees about 175 million tweets and about 300,000 new visitors on a daily basis. With numbers like these you’d be out of your mind not to consider Twitter as a viable source to connect with your employees as well as potential candidates.

Both, individuals and companies are currently using Twitter for their own benefits.

Uses/Benefits for Individuals:

1. People can receive information instantaneously: Twitter allows people to send and receive messages when they occur. It keeps them informed about popular trends and topics and they can also stay informed about what is happening in the world by just checking their cell phones.
2. Connects individuals with other professionals and companies: Twitter can help people establish new professional relationships, developing collaborative networks and creating new contacts in areas that interest them.
3. Fast and brief information: Short messages allow direct and accurate information in a short period of time.
4. Bring out people’s creativity: If you're a creative editor, freelance editor or writer, Twitter can help you develop content that is more direct and effective.

Uses/Benefits for Companies in terms of HR:

1. Self-promotion: If you are an HR professional looking to promote your employer brand, Twitter can help you reach your target audience. This could be your employees or candidates for your job offers. Tweets rich in content such as: company information, job postings, tips and advice for applying and information about what it's like to work for the company are all an excellent opportunity to engage with your audience.
2. Connect with customers and fans of your brand: Through Twitter companies can communicate directly with their most loyal followers, thus generating good public relations. It is also a great channel to receive feedback about your product or service. This initiative consequently affects your employer brand. Moreover, there are a ton of weekly chats that you can participate in that will help you engage with others registered in this social media platform.
3. Connect with your employees: Use this network to connect with your employees. Congratulate them through Twitter when they are hired, when they achieve an important goal or even when they get a promotion.
4. Advanced search: Acting as one of the largest search engines Twitter has become the top spot for HR professionals to look for candidates to fill job vacancies.  Advanced search queries are popular among recruiters and other professionals that are looking to data specific to a topic, location, and even defined radius. If I am a recruiter wanting to find those searching for a sales job, within my city and again within 30 miles of my corporate office, that’s possible.
5. Free marketing: If a company wants to reduce their marketing budget Twitter can definitely bring economic benefits. Through twitter you can advertise for free your job openings or promote the next Job Fair that you will be attending.
6. More traffic: through Twitter you can generate more traffic to the company website or blogs. Twitter updates may carry links to the company site or different blogs that the company promotes, which added to a good number of followers, can help the company get more visitors to their own website. You can even have links that direct your target audience to a specific page on your website, for example the page where you post your open jobs.

Using Twitter is up to you, but I strongly recommend you to give it a try if you haven’t and of course let me know how it went.

When Social Media Becomes the Elephant in the HR Department

This morning I found this great comic by the cartoonist Dan Piraro. It’s based on the famous American phrase “Elephant in the Room" which is a metaphorical idiom for an obvious truth that is either being ignored or going unaddressed. The idiomatic expression also applies to an obvious problem or risk no one wants to discuss.

For too long now, social media has been that elephant in the HR department. As I said in a previous post: Introducing HR to Social Media, the talent is online we must engage with them, create useful practical content for our target audience, be creative. The time for a HR Social Media Strategy is NOW!

It's time to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

Business Coaching: The Route to High Performance

For many years companies have focused in their employees development. They have done en effort to upgrade the employee’s knowledge, skills, and abilities. Indeed, companies generally organize several development workshops throughout the year so their employees can receive the best training. Three days, maybe a week in a glamorous hotel with exquisite food and incredible, speechless, expert speakers.

However, I have bad news for you. They can all be a waste of your time. For sure you will be entertained by a parade of speakers, and afterward you’ll be required to critique those speakers and rate how effective they were. But nobody is critiquing you. Nobody is following up to see what you learned or if you actually became more effective at your work due to this workshop. As a result, the people who may be learning the most are the speakers and not necessarily you.

This is when business coaching comes along. Coaching is the art to provide positive support, feedback and advice to an individual or group in order to improve their personal effectiveness in the business setting. In other words it’s a training or development process in which an individual gets support while learning to achieve a specific personal or professional result or goal.

The coaching process involves two main actors: the coach and the coachee. The coach is the leader, supervisor or partner that gives coaching and the coachee is the learner, the person who receives coaching. Generally the coach has greater experience and expertise than the coachee and offers advice and guidance, as the coachee goes through the learning process.

The structures, models and methodologies of coaching are many. However, the style I use and consider very effective is the “socratic method.” This method consists in daily conversations between the coach and the coachee in which meaning can be found by asking simple questions through discussion. The questions and answers between the coach and the coachee develop into dialogue to search for an answer. This method facilitates the learner to grow personally and professionally while delivering excellent business results.

The coaching sessions can take place live or online. Today there are many gret tools on the web that facilitate these conversations: Skype, Google Talk, IChat, Facetime, among others.

As Winston Churchill said: “to improve is to change and to be perfect is to change often.” Believe me, coaching is the tool to conquer that perfect change.