The Academy

The academy is global, and plans to upskill the social media world as more businesses realise that the job should be a more strategic role, rather than being placed in the hands of interns. Their recognised, academic, and industry-specific social media certifications will help boost the overall quality of many businesses’ social media accounts, and provide staff with training they wouldn’t otherwise have.

As well as paid for courses, there are also a great range of free online courses. The Hootsuite Platform Training allows users to learn more about Hootsuite, and provides them with the skills needed to make the most of its features. There’s also Social Marketing Training, an Advanced Social Strategy Training & Certification, a Social for Health Care Training & Certification, and Social Selling Training & Certification. Basically, there is a lot you can learn.

Why it’s important

First and foremost, your business is important, and so the image you portray on social media is important. This means that if you ask an untrained person without any experience of using social media for business you are taking a big risk. The person running your accounts needs to have knowledge of the company, would you send an intern or a junior to a big networking event? Probably not, so giving an unqualified person the responsibility of your business’ online presence is quite risky.

Whilst social media can be easy, it’s only easy once you know how. By properly learning how to do it, your company will soon be reaping the benefits of a good strategy and great execution. Tweeting willy-nilly just doesn’t bring in the customers!

Anyone who works in social media (for a business, your personal Twitter/Facebook/Instagram doesn’t count) knows that it is constantly changing, developing, and fluctuating. What gets you 20 likes one day could get 200 another day, guesswork just isn’t enough. Proper training and attention to social media allows businesses to be much more strategic, and ultimately get the best results.

If your businesses is in need of some social media training, check out our training courses here

The post Social media is no longer a job for interns, and Hootsuite knows it appeared first on MiHiDigital.

With this comes an element of time.  If you wanted to go for a drink with someone in real life you’d need to invest the time in going to the pub, sitting down and having a chat.  The same also applies to social media; if you want to truly interact with people you have to invest the time in building dialogue through whatever platform you are using.

This is where the syndication comes in.  Platforms like Hootsuite will allow you to schedule tweets or ping them to other networks such as LinkedIn or Facebook.  The obvious positive of doing this is to free the time you spend each day on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on.  You can schedule you tweets, select which networks they are going to and sit back while you focus on other things.

Now the downside…

Many people use this as a replacement and not a supportive tool to their social media activity.  You’ll probably have them too, people that have the same sales tweet going out repeatedly day after day.  Whilst social media should provide you with additional avenues from which to promote your products and services you’ll be doing the potential benefits you can gain a disservice by using this methodology.

Lets draw an equivalent comparison to direct marketing.  This type of syndication would be akin to a direct mail campaign where you sent the same piece of marketing material to the same householders time and time again.  Would you expect to gain results from this? You might get one or two leads but by and large there will be a growing level of apathy or even irritation to your marketing methodology.

The same principles apply to social media.  It’s also worth bearing in mind that if you’ve scheduled all of your tweets in you won’t be reacting to, commenting on and showing an interest in others.

Ever been to a party or a dinner with someone who only wants to talk about themselves? How long were you willing to listen to that person.

We’ve touched on reacting to tweets above and it’s also vital you are able to respond to questions, queries and comments that arise from your own posts.  Are you able to do this as efficiently if they’re scheduled in?  Do you even know when they are going out? Perhaps or probably not.

At MiHi Digital a key focus of our social media work is always to ensure that people are making the most of their time and the value they gain from that time is being maximised.

Syndication can add value when you are using it to support activity.  It is however, not a substitute to time.

For more information on how we can help you gain more from the time you spend on social media please give us a call or email hello@mihidigital.co.uk

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