Managing Your Social Media Profile: Engagement is the key

Social media is nothing new and chances are that you have one if not several social media profiles on some of the popular platforms, like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. The trouble is, most companies are severely under-using or even abusing their profiles. So, how do you turn around your company's Web image and use it for profit.

Just because your company has a profile or two on some of the popular social media platforms doesn't mean you're doing well with your social media efforts. Engaging your audience with the right tools and strategy is the only way to profit from social media.

To begin, you need to choose what platforms you're targeting. Take it slow to start. I mentioned abuse earlier, many companies have a tendency to  try to be everywhere when they start with social media. While that's not a bad thing, you need to make sure that you're cultivating your following on each platform. Without the right tools, effort and strategy, you could end up with a mess on your hands. I would suggest starting with the more popular platforms mentioned above and then later on using other sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious to augment your marketing efforts.

If you don't have a clear picture of your lead profile, getting entrenched in social media will certainly develop that picture more clearly. Get to know your followers. Watch their tweets, comments and activity; engage with them. Follow trending topics and engage that discussion. You can't expect success if all your posts and tweets are simple advertisements. This is called spam and it will be flat-out ignored. 

Once you've had a couple weeks engaging (engaging being the operative word here) your audience, you need to find ways to engage that audience en masse and direct that audience to your offers. There are many, many great automation tools out there, however one of my favorites is TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a standalone application (Also available for iPad, iPhone and Android) that allows you to view and interact with your followers from as many profiles you like on many of the major social media platforms. The application can be configured to follow trending topics, schedule tweets and posts and view your mentions. There are many other tools out there like Hootsuite, which is a web-app that serves the same purpose as TweetDeck, with some collaboration tools to boot. Twhirl, which is another desktop app that also ties multimedia in with yfrog and Seesmic. 

Beyond engaging your audience in a big way, you also need to be able to measure that engagement and your KPIs for social media. You might want to measure total followers, monthly mentions, traffic from any one of these sources, but ultimately, you need to be able to measure how much new revenue is being generated from your hard earned social media efforts.