May 05, 2010
Crain’s interview featuring Harp Social:
By now, most entrepreneurs probably understand the value of social media, but many are intimidated by the technology or scared off by the time commitment. Diane Rayfield, social-media marketing specialist at Oakbrook Terrace-based Harp Social tells Crain’s contributor Steve Hendershot how small businesses can use social media effectively with limited resources.
Crain’s: How much time does effective social media require?
Diane Rayfield: It’s important for entrepreneurs to realize that this does take time. Often, underestimating the amount of time it takes is the reason small businesses don’t succeed or stop using social media. We say plan on devoting 10 to 20 hours a week on social media, which sounds like a lot but it includes a lot — developing content, writing your blog, going through alerts you pick up through monitoring.
Crain’s: Describe that last step, monitoring. What is that, and how is it useful?
Diane Rayfield: I recommend monitoring even before you begin creating content for social media, but it’s not too late if you’ve already started. Use Google Alerts, which is a free monitoring tool that provides you with real-time alerts when one of your keywords appears in an article or a blog. So you would set up keywords for your business name, brand name, competitors’ names, key personnel, investors, and then industry keywords. So, say I set mine up to alert me for use of the term “social media,” every time a blog mentions that phrase, I get an alert. I can take that content, quickly preview it, and if it’s something I find interesting, then, number one, I can read it and learn; two, I can comment on it to show my expertise in the field and to give me more visibility, and then, three, I can use it as content to publish to my Twitter and Facebook accounts. That’s what social media is about: creating relationships, being helpful, sharing information. That’s what monitoring is great for.
You’ll also want to monitor in order to correct misinformation. Someone might say something about your brand or business that’s not true, and you have the opportunity to join that conversation and correct them. You can also create brand evangelists by monitoring, because if someone says something nice about your company or brand, you can thank them, and that makes them feel special, and after that they’ll have more brand loyalty.
Crain’s: Ultimately, there’s no way around the idea that you need to spend some time creating content, but it’s easy to get bogged down by the ongoing commitment, as well as the repetition of keeping up a presence on several social-media platforms. What are your suggestions for making this manageable?
Diane Rayfield: We recommend using an aggregator such as Hootsuite, FriendFeed or Ping.fm. We use Hootsuite, which bills itself as a Twitter tool but really functions as a social-media aggregator. It’s a great tool to push content across multiple platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
One thing you can do with Hootsuite is use a little tool called Hootlet, which you drag to your bookmark bar, and then when you come across interesting articles that are relevant to your industry, simply click the Hootlet tool, and that creates a short sentence and content that then links to your Twitter account, either right then or you can schedule it for later in the day. So you spend half an hour going through your Google Alerts for the day, and that way you find interesting content. You can then push those posts out so they simultaneously publish on your Facebook wall, your LinkedIn status update and Twitter. By doing that, you can be pretty active on all those accounts, and you should be. You can also use advanced functions to track content from blogs that you think are really relevant to your industry and then automatically push new content from those blogs to your social-media sites. That way, when you get overwhelmed taking care of other business needs, your aggregator is working for you, making sure your social-media sites remain active.
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