The Green Sheet Online Edition

February 22, 2016 • Issue 16:02:02

Boost Your Biz

Social media management

Back when Myspace was the reigning social media platform and social media was a curiosity to most business people, many payment professionals concluded it would be a waste of time to spend a portion of their business days interacting on social media.

In contrast, many of today's payment businesses routinely maintain a social media presence on such platforms as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and even Pinterest. They have found this to be an effective way to let customers and prospects see a different side of their operations – philanthropic efforts or community engagement, for example.

Businesses also use social media to offer useful information free of charge to people who may someday become clients; promote targeted, time sensitive offers to members of niche markets; and address customer service issues right away, averting what might otherwise develop into public relations nightmares.

Larger businesses can employ staff who devote full time to social media management. Sole proprietors and owners of small businesses often do not have the resources to do that, so they interact on the networks they feel are most important to their customers. This can be extremely labor intensive, given all of the other responsibilities involved in running a business.

Bringing it all together

To help with this task, companies large and small are using social media management tools. Some of the most popular options include Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Social Studio and TweetDeck. Here's a brief description of each adapted from their respective websites:

• Hootsuite enables you to manage all your social profiles, promote your brand, generate quality leads and increase website traffic in one place. Hootesuite's publishing features can automatically discover, schedule and post content for you. You can create keyword search streams to track mentions, respond to customers and nurture leads, and monitor every conversation across your social networks. You can also share tasks with team members and analyze performance using one login and dashboard.
• Sprout Social is a collaborative platform that helps ensure smarter, faster, more efficient social communications. It enables you to build and maintain your community by easily starting, monitoring and joining social conversations. You can quickly respond to questions and resolve issues across networks and reach your audience with the tools to execute and optimize social marketing plans.
• Social Studio is a Salesforce.com platform that helps your team plan, execute and track compelling social media marketing campaigns and build more meaningful relationships with customers. You can harness social conversations to listen, analyze, publish and engage with your customers one-to-one, as well as analyze conversations from over 650 million sources across the globe.
• TweetDeck is a Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing and engagement. You can organize and build custom timelines and, in one interface, keep track of lists, searches, activity and more; create searches to track topics, events and hashtags, and refine the results with filters; and share an account with your team without sharing your password.

By listing these providers, The Green Sheet is not endorsing them; however, if you are interested in trying out social media management tools, they are a good place to begin your research.

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