Time allocation in social media management
7 Comments
A few of you left great comments on my recent post, creating a social media management routine. For many hotel marketers, the biggest issue may not be which activities to perform, but how much time should be spent on each one.
How do you allocate your limited time among a myriad of social media options?
I think this is a good time to take a careful look at your metrics. What’s working? What’s not?
Follow the data!
This may require you to develop a new set of metrics, but numbers don’t lie. If a trendy new site isn’t producing results you’re looking for, then stop spending so much time on it. Of course, most new initiatives will require some time to build your profile in the community, but after a few months you should have sufficient data to guide your management schedule.
Some networks naturally consume more time than others. Writing a blog post takes longer than posting a tweet. Producing a new YouTube video will take longer than moderating a Flickr group. But if the additional time investment gives you higher overall ROI, then it’s worth it.
It comes back to Pareto’s 80/20 rule – find the select few social media activities that produce tangible results, and focus your time there.
Since this is highly variable on your property and hotel concept, follow these steps to create a unique plan for you:
- Develop new metrics for measuring social media activity that are relevant to your hotel.
- Compare your past statistics with your new metrics. (If you have not been gathering sufficient data, then take a week or two to do that)
- Use insights from your comparison to develop a list of social media top performers – for you.
- Create a personalized social media management routine based on this data. (Feel free to adapt my chart for your own use)
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Another great post Josiah! I think we all need to bring social media management into our workflow and treat it in the same way as we do checking our emails.
I now get contacted directly via Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, flickr and even our blog. I try and answer these as if they were a direct enquiries from my website.
We did write a post on our blog about Social media being a waste of time which might be relevant to this post http://www.sortedsites.info/social-networking/social-media-big-waste-of-time-or-your-most-powerful-free-marketing-tool.htm
Because it looks like I am stalking your blog, I will say this:
yelp & tripadvisor are obvious tasts
Blog seems obvious so you can peel a RSS from it and punch it into FB or twitter. Also searching and engaging with google alerts about every time your keywords are brought up…. I always do that. Also go to wikitravel and enter clients, travel66 etc….
Twitter is obvious because I book like crazy, and get incredible connections (for my clients, as well as my personal biz)
I get youtube and flickr, but am not necessarily getting incredible play off it. I look at it as long term brand building and nothing else. Information for people that find it. Some of my brands have unique value props, like hot springs, eco-build, historic, etc…. so there is a little bonus but not that much meaningful interaction yet.
I get digg and delicious – but I just don’t think it matters for teeny brands and small boutique clients? Like I said… I might be missing something here.
But tripadvisor, yelp, twitter could take up all my time. The other stuff I fill in when I can…. even though it feels like I will never get on top of all of it (because I won’t).
As for now, as rapidly as all this changes, I have to say I am not seeing any meaningful interaction or play with FB. I just don’t see any real *business* happening on the pages or groups. Personal pages, but that too is a closed network of relatively close people.
I might sound naive, but I am thinking it will be some time
oops… I am thinking it will be some time before we really see what can be done with Fb. For now… no one is jumping off of it to book, and no one is searching it for information. The Closed Network aspect of FB is making brands impossible to find, as well as look like Spam when they post on their walls.
The trend for de-fanning pages is pretty aggressive, I think. Heck… I am. I am ditching some of my favourite brands ever because the spamfeed from FB is so annoying.
@John – You’re right…many of these channels take the place that email has in the past. People may prefer to contact us using Twitter or Facebook, and we need to be sensitive to that.
@Michael – Your comments are always insightful! I like that concept of focusing on a platform like blogging that has multiple applications (the blog, search benefits, RSS syndication, updates through Feedburner, etc). I agree that a small boutique client may not see the same potential from Digg as a bigger publisher.
I think none of us feel like we’re ever “finished” online. In my mind, the whole point of a maintenance system is to make sure all the bases get covered…if only to a small degree.
Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter certainly do work very well in the hotel space. I like to think of them as simply channels that allow different people to participate in. For example, I have one online effort where daily blogging is central to it’s effort. The interesting part if that while the blog’s analytics so good traffic and the overall score of the blog by site’s like grader.com, there are very few comments left. Those comments are the only indicators to outside people of how well trafficked a blog is.
Once the blog was tied into Twitter and Facebook, the commenting shifted to those two sites. The blog posts automatically update both Twitter and Facebook (this is key and means I only spend a few minutes a day on those two). Comments on blog posts are being made in both Twitter and Facebook. Sometimes up to 40 Facebook comments occur for a blog post!
It just happens that the demographic I am hitting is more comfortable at commenting in Facebook or Twitter. Simply more convenient channels for this blog’s readers.
As to the comment about it being impossible to find brands in Facebook, I see it differently. You have to point people there, not have anyone stumble across you.
For the campaign I used to illustrate my opinions, all our efforts point to the blog as the ultimate traffic point. From the blog there are links to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, blip.tv, and so on. So our clients find the blog, then go out to Facebook, not the other way around.
Your strategy will be different, this works well for our very targeted and small niche clientèle.
Metrics are key and monitoring them is not difficult. Most blogging software has wonderful analytics and, imo, it is important to look at referrers (this is fun in Flickr as well because if you have Creative Commons licensing, your photos will show up being used in very interesting places).
Allow your clients to participate in your conversation by allowing them to choose what channels they feel the most comfortable with!
So true. Too many marketers spend too much time measureing the metrics which aren’t applicable to their objectives. A nice way to start social media projects is with POST. Look at the People you’re targeting, focus on your Objective, and then come up with a Strategy and find the relevant Technology (social media platform) for that.
Good article. Cheers Josiah.
Richard Goodchild
BluSky Marketing