Social media is a hungry monster which is never, ever sated. It never sleeps, it never stops, and is forever searching the next big thing. It creates and destroys trends, it connects and disconnects people from the world, and it can inform and misinform. To control social media even a little, is to wield true power, yet so few have managed this feat well if at all.
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A Team Sport
Social media management is generally done by a team, not just by one person. There is a great reason for this. One person has a limited amount of time to give, and social media can take all of that time and a lot more, so the more time is given, the better the outcome. One person cannot be expected to put in a work week allotting 120 hours, it just isn’t possible, so for those instances where (for instance) a Fortune 500 company needs social media management done, they may have a manager who then employs a team of twenty to get everything done in a week.
Sourcing Content
The majority of this problem is with sourcing online content. A person has to determine whether the content they’re finding is trendy, could be trending, is relevant, or reliable. On top of this, they have to vet it for other things, like whether people will enjoy it or share it, test it to see if it will perform well in a focus group before sending out larger quantities of the same type of post. The internet is vast, and there is a better than decent chance you’ll find bogus information or information with an angle over actually informative, non-biased facts.
A person who is looking to find information to share, has a lot of tools at their disposal thanks to the internet, because the vastness and endless vista that is out there has a lot of things to find, anything and everything a person can dream up. That also means it’s going to take some time to sort out the good quality things from those which are lesser quality. Most social media sharers try to find ways to crowdsource their information so that they’ve got their fingers on the pulse of what is trendy right then in their industry.
Crowdsourcing & Reddit
Crowdsourcing is a specific sourcing model in which businesses use contributions from Internet users to obtain something that is needed. For instance – say you have invented a dog collar that will notify the owner when their animal gets out of the gate. You have already polled people in the neighborhood who thought it was a good idea, but how about asking the world? With the information available online, it can be all too easy to get statistics from online data gathering efforts, and failing that – just asking via questionnaire or survey. Once you figure out that you have a receptive market for your product, you can narrow it down to people’s preferred colors so you can make your first line of collars. All of this can be done by crowdsourcing data to find out what people like. Posting works the same way. With content it’s about what is trending and popular, and crowdsourcing can help you match your vision with what everyone else is paying attention to.
Let’s begin with Reddit, easily the most massive source of entertainment, social networking, and news that covers the largest variety of topics that is out there today. Reddit is not just these main categories, but also sub-reddits, which are sub-categories of main ones, which can send you so far down the rabbit hole that you’ll lose hours and hours following threads to their end. The good part about these sub-reddits though, is that if your brand is in cooking for instance, you would go to the /r/cooking (https://www.reddit.com/r/cooking) sub-reddit. Go take a look, you’ll see a great example at first glance.
If you don’t find your brand or niche at first sight, there is a search feature.
Are you familiar with BuzzFeed?
Crowdsourcing for Profit
The next step here to crowdsourcing involves finding the content that is the most “upvoted” meaning that people like it the most. Then you filter it to view the most popular content from the past hour, or day, or month, etc. So going back to cooking, if that is your niche, and you provide recipes or cooking tips, you would want to find out for instance, what the best cooking pan is. You want to primarily find out what other people think that is though, so you can promote that pan on your site – perhaps get an advertising kickback from the brand itself, so you go to your sub-reddit thread. That thread has a headline asking about the best cookware, and you scan the thread for the most upvoted comments. Those comments and replies to the comments will contain the best cookware, of which you can pick out the best pans.
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RSS Feeds
An RSS feed is a streaming source of news, headlines, and any other live information feeds that are able to be delivered directly to your computer. This means if you’re really into the Purina Dog Show, you can get live results to your mobile device or computer through an RSS feed. Most of them you only need to subscribe to. You can get updates from the news, weather, your favorite blogger, and even TV guides.
This is just one method, and that alone can easily take up most of an entire day by a team. Then you have things like RSS feeds that you can either subscribe to, or follow manually. You then look at all your alerts, or results and go through them one by one to determine if they are a good fit. Google Alerts work much the same way, and it’s great to scan through things relating to your niche or brand, but it takes a monumental amount of time to vet each article for fit, which means chasing down where the information came from and if it is reliable or from an authority on the subject. It would do you no good to say that charred meat causes cancer, and then cite some flaky article that is 250 words from a site called “medicineisfake.earthworks.org” you would rather find something from an actual database, university or science-related organization, or you’re just as flaky as your source.
News Sites
News sites are another place to get your information and there is no reason to have to fact check it, but there is the issue again of having to go one by one through every single news article to determine which of them are good enough to use. News sites are fantastic for finding names of people who were interviewed, which creates instant trust with people reading the article, and if you share quality articles like this then you can expect by extension to be trustworthy. The only issue is the time involved, and news sites can be more cumbersome than most to comb through for relevant articles.
Follow Ups
This is all aside to having to like, share, follow, reply and comment to each person involved on your social media sites. It can be very easy to see why people get overwhelmed handling social media, and it is certainly a massive job. For a team, it can be managed well, but if you’re a small business owner – you might be doing it all by yourself, which then makes the lackluster results obvious. There should be a better way out there, an answer for small business owners whose time is valuable. Social media demands that time from us, and it can be hard when we cannot divide it among our business’ needs and also give it to social media management.
Quick Tips
Using the above tips can help give you an edge, if you pick a couple things to focus on and get good at. It can help you determine where to source your information to share, but be sure not to get caught up with too much of your time spent on it if you don’t have it to spare because social media can easily take up all of it and then some. Give what you can, and just be sure that you maintain a high quality standard that is true to your brand.
Here is the best tip of all however: Do yourself a favor and sign up for a social media help tool like the MagiSocial Dashboard, can help you save a little time by sourcing content and scheduling posts and a lot more, but you can supercharge that by signing up for the Content Writing Service which takes the time you save and multiplies it exponentially. You can easily handle your social media nearly hands-free, no team required, which is the best answer of all.
