How Can You Find the Time to Manage Your Social Media Interactions?

 

Social media is an important component of any business' outreach today. But the time to manage social media interactions, whether limited to Facebook or expanded via such platforms as Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Yelp, can be a demanding time drain on a practice's staff.

How to overcome this and find solutions, so that you can truly forge positive relationships with current and prospective patients—and more efficiently manage the time spent responding and connecting to comments on your pages or questions about your posts, is what's behind a very helpful new resource from the folks at HubSpot.

How to Monitor Social Media in 10 Minutes a Day is a free e-book from the digital marketing media site. The information suggests a way of streamlining your strategy so you can focus on what's most important. HubSpot explains why monitoring your social media platforms really matters, makes a strong case for "who" should monitor "what" in your business, and offers tips and a 10-step checklist to help you put it all together.

The report noted, "The reason why monitoring is so important is because it puts the social back in social media. Brands and individuals who publish without listening are just screaming through a megaphone with no consideration for others. You have to be sensitive to what people actually want from you or your brand."

According to the report, response time to comments (or complaints) is important to users. "As it turns out, people also have some pretty high standards when it comes to response time. Especially when they've got a bone to pick with your brand. According to charts published on Search Engine Watch, 70 percent of surveyed Twitter users expect a response from brands they reach out to on Twitter, and of those users, 53 percent want that response in under an hour. In fact, the percentage of people who expect a response within the hour increases to 72 percent when they're issuing a complaint."

Also, HubSpot suggests, it can help streamline your own time if you focus on the most important 'influencers' among your followers.

Sometimes those are hard to determine but often, the way posts are written can give clues. It's key to scan the posts to prioritize the ones that will merit your attention before others. As HubSpot points out, "You'll notice that some messages require that you simply listen and reflect, while other times you'll need to respond...and fast! Responding (or not) to these varied scenarios will depend on who the person is, what they said, and what time they said it."

HubSpot, which is known for its helpful resources, events and tutorials, offers a program to help people manage much of this, called the HubSpot Social Index. This is a service (there's a free trial on the site) which plugs into your contacts database, color-codes customers and leads and enables you to see who those folks are.