Social Media Marketing Productivity: Putting Your Best Foot Forward

by Frank M. Waechter | Social Media Marketing

The role of a social media marketer is now more in demand than ever before. Managing a social media platform takes a unique alchemy of skill, experience, insight and the ability to think outside of the digital box. Having said this, the ultimate goal is still the same. It is to successfully present the product or service of a particular business to the intended audience. Working smart as opposed to hard will breed success. Working smart heavily involves the concept of productivity in social media marketing. Let us look at some of the ways that this essential feature can be leveraged to produce viable results.

Boosting Social Media Marketing Productivity: Knowing Your Goals

Would the captain of a sailing vessel ever set out to sea without knowing the ultimate destination? Planning your exploration is the same concept to take into account from the very beginning. Professional social marketers always have a sound game plan in place before they undertake any projects. A handful of questions that must be answered well in advance include:

What are the short- and long-term targets?
How will social media help to address these goals?
What is your intended demographic?
What type of brand identity do you hope to establish?

Examining each of these questions will enable you to place your focus in the correct direction; minimising wasted efforts and vastly increasing productivity.

Time Management

One of the most pragmatically useful tips is to plan the release of your content around a predetermined schedule. Many would-be marketers tend to become quickly overwhelmed with when to post, how often and on which sites. This will ultimately lead to confusion and lower levels of productivity. There are several social media tools which can help with the planning aspect of content and when it should be publicly released.

Easy-to-Learn Tools

Social marketing should always involve the latest productivity engines and CMS platforms. Unfortunately, there are many times marketers use the wrong medium. To be at fault with channels or tools can result in lots of confusion, and ultimately, PR campaigns will suffer. Choosing the best portal for your specific needs is critical. Each should boast a user-friendly architecture, and ideally, it should be scalable so that you can add or subtract different sections as might be required in the future. The basis of any productive campaign in digital marketing always involves laying a firm groundwork.

Collaboration and Interdepartmental Accountability

Many of the most efficient media campaigns are the products of collaborative thinking and a well-oiled team. Communication is therefore essential so that each member can express his or views to the others. Thankfully, the majority of marketing platforms will allow you to delegate certain tasks to specific stakeholders based off of their skills and expertise. It is still critical to point out that relying upon these systems alone can be dangerous. It is the responsibility of the team leader to make certain that everyone is actively involved and meeting the appropriate deadlines.

Well-Defined Development Processes

Social media marketing productivity also involves setting up clear steps towards achieving a clear goal. Examples can be hitting certain sales targets, gaining a particular number of followers or surpassing revenue figures from the previous financial quarter. The main takeaway point is that defining the steps involved will provide all stakeholders with a clear course of action. Another benefit is that checklists and other step-by-step guides can help to highlight any potential problem areas within a campaign.

The Decidedly Negative Impact of Distraction

In this sense, we are referring to the distractions that can be caused by news feeds about marketing tasks. It is quite easy to lose focus while working if we happen to come across a site’s or friend’s update or an interesting third-party article. Distraction can be the downfall of what would have otherwise been a productive activity. Remaining focused on the one task at hand is critical. If this proves nearly impossible, there are numerous software algorithms which will block the incoming newsfeed.

Outsourcing Tasks

Even the most experienced marketing specialists will outsource specific tasks to third-party firms and similar consultants. Outsourcing will often involve ancillary concerns such as content calendars, customer service enquiries or blog and social media updates. The key point here is that the overall levels of productivity will be streamlined if the experts can devote more of their time to the core metrics involved with a project as opposed to tackling countless responsibilities to no avail.

These are some of the most efficient ways to increase social media marketing productivity within the existing workplace. Each should be implemented alongside the others so that the overall impact is more pronounced. The expression “time is money” is certainly appropriate here.

The post Social Media Marketing Productivity in 2017: Putting Your Best Foot Forward was first published on fmwaechter.com. Author Frank M. Waechter.

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Networking Technology and Events: An Overview of the Key Trends

by Frank M. Waechter | Digital Marketing

Networking Technology for conferences and events is changing at speed of light. Over the past decade, we have witnessed how the transformational power of technology has revolutionised many industries, from commerce to education and leisure. As a result, the events industry is not an exception. In recent years a series of new trends have emerged proving that technology can improve the quality of networking events and, as a result, bring higher returns on investment.

Networking Trends

One of those trends refers to how individuals attending an event are increasingly becoming perceived as active and engaged participants. Rather than as mere receptive audiences. People no longer attend events for the sake of attending or networking: they want to become an active part of them and have more control over their experience. The widespread availability of mobile devices and the adoption of social media for business purposes are one of the main reasons behind this qualitative change. Gamification is another key trend that has the potential to transform the way we think about and organise events.

Event planners have begun to realise the power that games have when it comes to motivating and engaging people. Event and conference mobile apps are part of the most popular ways of gamifying an event and of incentivising productive interactions. Lastly, digitalisation is playing a crucial role in shaping the way we produce and consume large amounts of information. There is a growing awareness about the possibilities that digital technologies can offer to events management, with a focus on enabling meaningful interactions and helping discover opportunities for collaboration. Below we discuss some examples of how to use technology for networking at exhibitions, conferences and events to benefit both event organisers and attendees.

Event Planning & Networking Technology

Networking technology can provide a useful platform that makes event planning more efficient, less time consuming, and more engaging. Therefore, for the majority of event planners, it has become common practice to focus on the social aspect of things, using social networks to promote an event, interact with participants to create a sense of community, get a dialogue going, and build enthusiasm before the actual event. Big data can also be used to improve the effectiveness of networking at events. Information collected through social media profiles can be used to target the interests of participants and create activities based on common interests.

Big Data and more

Use big data to let attendees set up and edit profiles before the event, and so find participants with similar interests, making face-to-face interaction easier and less awkward. Other event organisers are already experimenting with technologies like iBeacons, Bluetooth, and NFC in an attempt to make a more efficient use of big data. In addition, some typical applications include badge collection, surveys, digital vouchers, and the delivery of push notifications. These are all especially relevant ways of using networking technology at events to deliver a targeted experience and to transform interactions by giving them a personalised and meaningful edge.

Focusing On The Experience

The fact that event attendees are now considered active participants has put additional demands on organisers. Consequently, many planners have been focusing on architecting memorable experiences. Instead of simple events that can be ticked off a calendar. Some emerging trends with regards to this new emphasis on the experiential side of events include:

Wearables
Smart conference badges
Digital business cards
Social WiFi
Event communications tools

Wearables

Use wearables e.g. as a wayfinding tool, to make check-in faster and easier, or to quickly arrange meetings with other participants.

Smart conference badges

Smart conference badges rely on RFID technology to collect and store vital information about attendees. Helping to keep track of things like who they interacted with. Or which sessions they attended, or which vendor booths they visited. As a result, event organisers can also use the data collected by smart badges to generate analytics for subsequent follow-up.

Digital business cards

Digital business cards are another smart application of networking technology at events. These cards allow attendees to exchange and manage contact information seamlessly and to take advantage of “matching opportunities”. Furthermore, organisers can use them to build digital directories based on common interests or other relevant information.

Social WiFi

Give participants the chance to get online using their social network logins. This puts a wealth of useful data at the fingertips of event organisers. This data could include:

the duration of interactions
which sessions are more popular
the type of spontaneous web searches prompted by different talks

Event communications tools

Some organisers are already using in dedicated event apps that offer seamless communication opportunities between participants (such as app messaging tools or proximity networking apps) and between speakers and attendees, such as apps that filter the most relevant questions during Q&A sessions.

The article Networking Technology and Events: An Overview of the Key Trends was first published on fmwaechter.com. Author Frank M. Waechter.

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