twitter – AJ Garron

As time progresses, social media is becoming a more integral part of marketing as a whole. With the explosion in adoption it would be silly for companies not to take advantage of this innovative way to communicate with their customers. With the mass adoption of technology and social media, human behavior and expectations have changed and companies must adapt to these changes to remain competitive.

The internet as a whole has forever changed how people communicate, interact and access information. Due to the fact that just about any piece of knowledge, any unanswered question, or any cat video can be accessed within seconds, people now expect companies to respond to them faster. Whether they are trying to contact the business by phone, email or tweet, people want their answers and they want them fast. When crafting a social media initiative you must ensure that you have resources and tools available to identify and answer social mentions within a timely fashion to ensure your customers are satisfied. As a matter of fact, Hubspot did a study on this and they found that “72% of people that complain on social media expect a response within an hour!” Now, I would recommend answering more than just complaints, even a regular brand mention warrants the occasional response to make that person feel special. This is also a great way for large companies to create special experiences with their customers that hadn’t really been historically available. Just look at how this could positively impact your business:

Taken from Hubspot, click to view post

Another thing for companies to consider is the growth and decline of certain networks. Over the past 10 years or so we have seen many social networks fail and succeed and companies must be aware of the trends before throwing all their eggs in one basket. A strategy that spreads a few of the top social networks is better than investing all your resources into one. If you decide to tackle them one at a time, make sure the network is here to stay, you would hate to be that guy who dumped all your resources into marketing via Myspace back in 2006. The safe bet in this case is to do your research before rolling out a strategy and try to incorporate a few of the top networks first before diving into some of the smaller ones. A great place to start is Facebook and Twitter.

One last thing to remember is that when it comes to technology, the only constant is change. The space is ever changing and a social media initiative must keep this in mind. You must account for the strategy to constantly be changing and evolving in order to succeed. Just a few years ago there were only a couple major social media platforms to worry about incorporating into a social media strategy. Now, I have over 10 of social networking apps on my cell phone alone. Not only are the social networks evolving but the way people consume the networks are. Incorporating all these variables into a holistic marketing strategy that ensures a flawless transition from screen to screen, network to network and device to device is a must at this day in age.

Throughout my marketing endeavors I have come across tons of tools/ applications I’ve used to leverage all of the social networks. Three of them that have withstood the test of time are Tint, Tweetdeck and Just Unfollow. I use all of these personally as well as for business purposes which means they are extremely versatile and powerful. They all have different purposes and I will dive into Tint first.

For any brand that uses social media and has a website, I strongly recommend Tint. I know this is a broad demographic but it helps you understand the power behind this tool. In a nutshell, it is an easy way to embed all of your social feeds onto the web. As a matter of fact, I have a Tint feed on the homepage of this blog. I found out about them when they released a Wix plugin last year when I was building the website for my side business The Woods Collective. In case you haven’t heard of Wix, it is a drag and drop website builder and I highly recommend it if you aren’t efficient with HTML/CSS. Tint also offers custom options for mapping posts with certain keywords, mentions, and hashtags to displays for conferences and concerts. They operate on a freemium model which lets you add two networks for free and they strip out some of the customization options. The free version is more than enough for a personal user.

Next up is Tweetdeck. I was introduced to them within my first week at Dyn. At the time I was a business development rep, prospecting and trying to generate hot leads for the sales team. Tweetdeck helps keep a pulse on what people are saying about your company or your industry. It allows you to create columns which display a Twitter feed of a user specified keyword, hashtag, or twitter handle. Since I was generating leads for a DNS company I had a column for each of our competitors and for keywords such as “DNS Issues” or “DNS Outage” so I could see if people were having issues. I would then reach out via email or Twitter and offer up help. It can be extremely difficult to maneuver through all the noise on social media and Tweetdeck allows this to be possible.

Lastly, we have Just Unfollow. I found Just Unfollow when I was a business development rep for Dyn. Came across them while I was prospecting and started to email the founder to try to introduce Dyn’s DNS and Email services. Long story short, after about 8 months or so of talking with him on Google Chat he finally agreed to chat with us and he became a customer. Just Unfollow works with both Twitter and Instagram, which I heavily use, and monitors your followers. When people Unfollow you on either network you are able to see it and can make a decision to follow or un-follow them right from within the app. I use this more for personal stuff but it could be used by companies to maintain their followers and find new people to follow. They offer different ways to find similar people to follow based on your followers as well to help you grow your network. They are constantly adding features and its exciting to see this app grow.

I highly recommend these three tools to all the social media butterflies out there. I use all of them almost daily and they are a great compliment to social media in general. They help me use these networks to their full potential and, hopefully, I was able to uncover one of these tools for you.