That was my problem. I wasn’t borne into the computer world. I’ve had to struggle to learn it all and so this social media stuff frightened me at first. But I knew that I had to take advantage of what it offered but how was I to do that. Well you drive a car but, unless you are so inclined, you don’t have to know how they work, only what they do. So I applied that thinking and here’s how I’m using social media to build my on line-presence.
If you look at my business card it has a number of addresses which constitute my contact details, marketing opportunities and social media armoury.
As you can see it has. As you would expect, my e-mail and web sites but then there are four more addresses… the social media contacts that are the most important to me being my blog, business Facebook page, Twitter page and LinkedIn page.
Now knowing the increasing importance of each of these in our cyber connected world I made a critical assessment of my skills, talents, interests and time availability and reached a realistic conclusion.
I just didn’t have the skill, talent, interest or time to ensure that I could make these important media work for me effectively!
But I adopt an approach that will achieve the right result for me. In an increasingly faster and specialised world I could…
outsource that which I can’t or don’t do well to someone who could!
I found those skills, knowledge and support in my P.A. who was across all of these things and most importantly in whom I had implicit confidence and trust. We agreed that:
- She would manage all of business web and social media activities, (and I’ll call her the “manager” here to make it simpler).
- I would be responsible for the writing of the major content.
- Apart from that the manager would be responsible for all of the other activities which included creating support content and the regular, on time updating of each of those sites.
How to make social media for you
My strongest possible recommendation is that you delegate the responsibility for these activities in your practice to a member of the team or an external person on a part time basis as “manager” of these activities.
Here is what works for me and I’d recommend that you plan something along similar lines.
- My responsibility is to provide an article a fortnight on each of the five topic areas we have agreed that we should focus on for our data base. I can, and often do provide other articles on topics and situations that I think have relevance to our recipients. Articles can be brief (50 or so words) or quite long (200-500) dependent on my whims, business observations and creative juices.
- The manager adds these articles to my blog site and cues them to go out at regular intervals.
- Whenever a blog article is sent out the manager arranges for a “flavour” of the posting to be made as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn announcements.
- The manager monitors our Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn pages and responds to comments of relevance, referring any that she believes I might have a special interest in for my response.
- The manager has the freedom and authority to author and post Twitter , Facebook and LinkedIn comments as often as she believes necessary and without referring them to me prior (although we often chat about content that may be the subject of a posting).
- Once each fortnight these articles which have been blogged are collated by the manager and sent as my e-newsletter automatically (which is handled by a professional e-mailing management house thus eliminating all problems of subscriber sign up spamming, and bounce removal, etc).
- The manager decides what additional resources to use such as photographs, audio and video material and calls upon me to supply it as and when necessary.
So just find someone who can do it for you And leave you to do the important part… writing the stuff which you do so well anyway!
There’s probably someone you know who has the skills… or a kid… that would handle it for you!
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