This notes is sequel to previous social media basic notes for beginners. The note is from deep dive into social media -> online marketing course from the digital garage.

The writing explains you about best practices of using social media for your business. It contains social media planning best practices, social media management and monitoring tools, tracking and measuring the social media activity result, best practices of social media activities.

Let's start from the first subject.

Best practices for social media planning

- Sit down
- Sketch out a plan that contains:

  * what you want to post.
  * when you want to post.
  * where you want to post.
  * who should post.
  * what topics it makes sense for you to post about
  * what is your audience interested in.
  * determine who is responsible for posting, sharing, and managing.

The example of what you want to post:

- Define your ultimate goal clearly.
- Suppose your goal is raising brand awareness, so make sure your post are designed to do that.
- Strengthen your copy-writing, such as doing a storytelling and soft selling.

The second example of what content do you choose:

- Suppose your goal is deepening relationship with your customer and potential customer/new follower, make sure your post designed to do that.

- This is different from example above. You must understand the audience and post an informational content.

- You must respond your audience, and be active. For example: make a quiz and give a prize for your follower who can answer quickly and exactly.

Social media tools

Once you set the plan like I mention above, you can use a tool so that you are able to manage your social media easily.

By using the tool you can get the benefits below:

- curate the content
- share or queue the content up so they automatically get shared based on the schedule.
- post across the network.
- collaborate with the team.
- listen what are people saying about you.
- social media analytic.
- get connected with influencer.
- track the activity.
- etc.

The examples of social media management tools: Everypost, Buffer, Hootsuite. If you want to try, they provide a free trial or free account with limited features.

Tracking the activity in social media

You can look at the social networks themselves when log in. Once you log in, they provide the data about your activities. For example: get reports about how many people you are connected, which posts are getting shared or liked, who are the new followers or likers, etc.

Being provided by the social networks themselves, you can learn more about audience's behave, how they interact with your content, and so on.

Beside social media management which is built in the social networks themselves, you can utilize the tools that I've mentioned above.

By utilizing 3rd party tools, you can compare the different social networks against each other, and give you all the reporting in one place. So, you don't consume more time with these tools.

The kinds of tracking

The examples of the data you can track with the tools:

- Are there any audiences click on a link you shared on social network?
- which kinds of content tend to get people to visit your website?
- How many like do you get?
- How many comment do you get?
- etc.

Best practices in social media activities

- People go online in social networks to share news, how-to tips, hobby like funny cat videos, etc. They're not there to read your sales copy.

- People who follows you on social media is already interested you, therefore there's no need to do a hard selling aggressively.

- Focus on providing good quality content to keep their attention.

- Social media is not one-way communication.

- Your audiences want to know that you are responding and listening.

- Respond the complaint in appropriate way, such as offering an apology and the solution. Show the audiences that you are truly supportive.

- Stay positive, respond to comments, focus on the networks that make sense, be persistent, and measure the results.