When you are new to social media, you might think you have to monitor all your incoming tweets and posts by others. Nothing could be further from the truth. Once you have quite a few people in your social media network, you are going to have a hard time monitoring what is happening using the conventional applications such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. You will need a centralized system to help you focus on the important people and information.
I tell my new clients who are new to social media that they will be sampling from the message stream. Take Twitter for example. You cannot expect to watch all the messages/tweets as the fly right past you. You will only get to focus on a few. For most of us, we do not have the time to monitor everything. We only have a few moments, spread out through the day, to look and engage. So don’t feel bad if you miss messages. It’s when people comment or message you directly, that you should definitely act. Make sure you reply back to them in a timely fashion. So watch what you can; but respond when someone connects with you.
There are things you can do to help you social media efforts. On Twitter, you can use “Lists” to place the key people you want to focus on. You focus is much sharper and you get to see more of what each person on the list is saying. You can place your friends on “Lists” in Facebook as well. This will help you keep track of what your closer friends are saying. So you can use strategy to help you listen better. If you listen more closely, you might hear what you are actually looking for.
Silver Level Strategy Tips:
What you need to focus on to get the information you are looking for.
[ismember]
[private_silverl]
One of the ways to focus your efforts is to use a third party social media application like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. Right now, I would recommend Hootsuite since they seem to have made their peace with Twitter. Tweetdeck is in violation of the Twitter terms of agreement. Either Tweetdeck will abide with the terms or they will be locked out from Twitter.
You can take the Twitter lists you have made and place them in either Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. This will allow you to fine tune focus on key people who want to follow and learn from. This can help remove a lot of the noise on Twitter, for example. You don’t want to listen to everything. You don’t have time for that. You want focus. What are your competitors doing? What are the leaders in your industry saying? These are things that you want to focus on.
By the way, have you checked your Klout score lately? Are you going up in klout? I will continue with more next time. Until then, stay focused.
[/private_silver]
[/ismember]
