Social media management can be a round-the-clock job. We sat down with Janice Kim (@JaniceK), Lithium’s Senior Manager of Marketing and Social Media, to learn her best-kept secrets for making the most of social.
What are your day-to-day responsibilities?
7:00 AM Check email quickly to make sure no social issues happened overnight that need immediate addressing.
8:00 AM Grab my morning chai latte and sit down to monitor our social channels for Lithium and Klout on Lithium Response. With over a million followers on Twitter and Facebook, we need an enterprise-grade tool that can scale for Lithium and Klout.
9:00 AM Escalate issues as necessary to the appropriate folks internally. Listen to our customers, users, and followers and respond in a timely fashion.
10:00 AM Manage incoming requests from cross-functional partners asking for social promotion of various content. Gather images and re-size them for the right social networks, review content in order to write a relevant tweet or post, schedule the social promotion for the best time to reach that audience.
11:00 AM Explore new ways to innovate with our social media strategy. For example, we just rolled out bitly links with our lith.tc domain for brand marketing purposes.
12:00 PM Quick lunch break with my laptop or mobile device always nearby!
1:00 PM Live-tweet a relevant webcast or a live event to insert our voice in the social conversation and generate new followers and prospects.
2:00 PM Check our social channels for inquiries or comments that require a response. It’s important to be prompt with replies! Re-assign help-related Klout tweets to our Klout Support team as appropriate, so they can follow-up with the right response.
3:00 PM Grab an afternoon sugar fix (a Reese's peanut butter cup usually does the trick) and keep moving! Find social content that’s relevant to our audience and schedule tweets/posts for tomorrow for both the Lithium and Klout audiences. Manage our online calendar of social promotions on Lithium Reach.
4:00 PM – Create Click to Tweets for various partners in our organization- for upcoming press releases, for our internal team of Tweeters who lend extra muscle to promote our content, for webcast panelists, etc.
5:00 PM – Check our social channels again for any new comments/inquiries and respond accordingly.
9:00 PM – One last check on our social channels before logging off for the night to address any pressing issues. Social media management can be a 24/7 job- and you’re dealing with incoming posts in all different time zones- but it’s critical to show your customers you’re there for them around the clock.
What is your favorite thing about your job?
I love connecting with our followers – it’s fun to get a glimpse into how they think and what their needs, likes, and wants are. And being able to assist them or point them in the right direction is rewarding.
How do you handle trolls?
First, my advice is to take it as a compliment. If you don’t have trolls, your brand hasn’t truly arrived in the social media world!
Secondly, respond tactfully with humor.
Lastly, set the record straight by countering fiction with fact. If the trolls are spreading rumors or inaccuracies about your brand, it’s important to clear up the tales as quickly as possible, but with grace and kindness.
With such a small team managing both Lithium and Klout social channels, how do you scale your social media program?
Having the right social media management and marketing tools is crucial, particularly when you’re a small team like us. Lithium Reach and Response have been a lifesaver, especially as our customer base continues to grow. With Reach, we went from using 6 tools down to 1 tool to manage our social marketing and publishing. My team members can upload assets and draft social posts themselves, and then with the tool’s approval permissions in place, I’m the one to review and approve the posts. Everything takes place in our social marketing/publishing tool. This eliminates the need for time-consuming back-and-forth outlook emails, excel spreadsheets for sharing content and editorial calendars, native posting, and even link shortening as Reach integrates with bitly and shortens the links automatically within the tool. These features streamline the process incredibly and make our scrappy team very nimble.
With Response, we can easily assign tweets internally to the appropriate folks to handle. This allows for a quick response from our internal team of subject matter experts. And the user doesn’t have to witness any silos in our organization.
What tools or features of those tools have been most useful in your work?
I love that Response automatically shortens links in our tweets with the Bitly integration. This saves valuable time by removing a previously manual step. I also love that Reach determines the best time to post for us – this removes the guess work from the process and allows me to just select a general time range when I want something posted. Then, I sit back knowing the tool is smarter than me when it comes to reaching our audience at the optimal time.
What advice do you have for someone new to social media management?
Here are my top 4 tips:
Study other brands in the process of finding your unique brand voice. Then make sure you deploy that brand voice consistently across all your posts- this will require training other team members to publish and respond in that same voice.
Enlist the help of tools to make your day-to-day job easier and more efficient. Technology should be your best friend!
Have fun! When you’re genuinely enjoying social conversations with your followers, your conversations will be more authentic and engaging.
Challenge yourself to measure the social media impact to your business. This will give you executive-level support to secure budget for resources like technology tools and team personnel, and it will ultimately prove that you’re adding value.
Join the conversation with me on Twitter @LithiumTech, @Klout, and @JaniceKim100!
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