If you’re one of our many loyal readers, you’ll remember our recent ‘Social Sites’ blog post. If you haven’t read it yet – we highly recommend you do so first! We explored the variety of social networking platforms currently available – essential for pet business owners.To follow on nicely from our previous blog post – we wanted to educate you on how to effectively manage your online presence. If you’re a new business looking for some direction, read on and if you want a helping hand – don’t forget to reach out to our social media specialists.
What is ‘Social Media Management?’. In a nutshell, business social media management is the process of managing your online interactions across your social sites. There are multiple tools that help you manage your time effectively. Our favourite tool is a program called ‘Hootsuite’. As one of the leading social marketing tool’s out there, it allows you to pre-load updates and auto-posts to the time you set – so you don’t have to worry about remembering to schedule them! There is a ‘complimentary’ package and a ‘premium service’. This tool also allows you to post across multiple sites at the same time – including Facebook, Twitter & Instagram.
Here at StreetDog, we use this tool on a day-to-day basis, it helps us organize our posts and tweak our posting schedule to align with our target audience – at the optimum time of the day. Genius! Many of our clients download Hootsuite but have trouble continually creating posts – and that’s where we come in! With a team of creative writers – you never have to worry about getting ‘writers block’ again.As pet business owners, marketing strategists or bloggers – we publish content daily in the hopes that it will resonate with our target audience. The best thing we do is write compelling tweets, captions, status updates and blog posts. The worst thing you can do? Ignore the conversation that you started.
Think of it like this – you’ve just walked into a bar, started a conversation with someone and really got them interested in who you are and what you do. After you’ve finished talking, they begin to ask you questions to find out more and – what do you do?, you walk away! In the real world that would be considered rude, in the business world that’s considered detrimental to the success of your business.
Community engagement is such a powerful tool, which allows your pet business to engage with potential customers and clients online. Give your pet business a voice that customers can relate too. Choosing the person to represent you online needs to understand the brand voice of your company – quite positively one of the most important roles!Remember that the responses you formulate are public and will be seen by even those who are not engaging (liking, commenting, clicking links). It’s important to note that not everyone will engage, but a lot of people will look to see if a business has responded to those who have asked questions.
First impressions count – from the first tweet, post, blog, face-to-face meeting, they leave a long-lasting impression of your pet business. We hope by giving an outline & overview of the importance in understanding how to manage your social media presence, you can take the step in the right direction to strengthening your online presence. If you’d like to know more and want to see how StreetDog can work with you to boost your online presence – email us at info@streetdog.ca today.
