Clog up your bin, not your business.
Often, we all use Facebook and Twitter etc without stopping to cleanse and make them work better for ourselves. How many times have you scrolled through your newsfeed and been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of entries? Or wondered why you’re not able to pinpoint the very people you want to be engaging with? Well, Shake are here to help with our top three tips for streamlined social media.
1. Twitter Lists
It’s important for your business that you’re seen to be listening as well as broadcasting, and this means following others as well as trying to get your own numbers up. Inevitably, some of the tweets that then appear in your timeline will not always be relevant to you, so Twitter’s list function comes into its own here. By creating lists of people you want to engage with, lists of people who might inspire you and lists of clients and customers, you can target everyone you want to; listen to everything that you need to and make sure you keep up to date with the very people that will help to drive your business forward. Lists can be public or private, but your increased efficiency and success should soon be visible to all.
2. Facebook’s Newsfeed
As with Twitter, it’s important to streamline your newsfeed so that you’re responding to and finding out about only those companies and characters that are relevant to you. As with Twitter also, you need to be hard-line – but you also need to be confident that you’re choosing the right people. Everyone has the option of removing friends or pages from their newsfeeds by hovering the mouse over the top right corner of a particular person’s post, but once they’ve been omitted, you won’t hear another peep from them. This means you have to select carefully so as to avoid the very real risk of missing something important. It’s worth spending time first listening and looking, and once you’re clear who is going to be crucial to the success of your business, then you can act decisively.
3. Twitter Alerts
Consider signing up with a site such as TweetBeep to make sure that you’re alerted every time your business is mentioned. You can choose as many key words as you like, and these services work in much the same way as Google Alerts to ensure you’re up to date with any news that’s relevant to your industry. Again, it’s about minimising your efforts and maximising your results. Any time spent trawling through unnecessary tweets is time wasted.
Kate Tyler is the founder of Shake Social and our long time social media expert. A regular speaker at events, Kate offers consultancy and training on a range of digital marketing topics, in particular safeguarding and using social media in an educational setting.