Those businesses who decide Social Media Marketing is going to be a great form of building and maintaining relationships with their customers will at some point have to assess how they will in the long term manage these profiles and the information that is shared on them. The best person to help them assess what possible solutions are available is to speak to a Social Media Strategist or Specialist.

There are many more options available to a business other than outsourcing the maintenance to a Social Media Manager, such as; hiring a Virtual Assistant for a few hours a week, using Social Media Management Software to automate back-end time sapping activities or lesser interactive social site components, or training current staff members to be responsible for content and sharing within their expertise areas of your business (like the concept of guest bloggers adding articles to your website). These are only some solutions and may be considered as more cost effective or better options for those businesses not wanting to let go of the reins and outsourcing the responsibility entirely.

By talking to a Social Media Strategist about the role of Social Media Marketing in your business they will assess your businesses situation based on the budget you want to allocate and help you plan out your businesses marketing strategy just like any other part of a long term growth plan.

If you are interested in knowing more about what I can do for your business as a Social Media Strategist then send me an email providing your contact details and I”ll be happy to arrange a talk with you.

The post A Social Media Manager – When to Hire One appeared first on Social Media Babe | Lee Ussher.

Which you choose comes down to how much as a business you intend to do or monitor on social sites and how much you want to hand over to a social media assistant or other staff member to do and monitor.

Most commonly used dashboard is Tweetdeck. This allows you to have multiples of the same social media type such as more than one twitter account. It also allows you to customise what you see in columns – so if you want a column to show new followers or those mentioning you, to respond to easily and quickly then this is good. Unfortunately it doesn’t allow you direct posting to Facebook Fan Pages and is limited in what social media sites you can add. Tweetdeck is a great place to start for the single business owner who may not be using a Fan Page but his Facebook profile, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. It allows you to send the same message out to a multiple amount of sites at the same time or schedule posts to go out at a later date.

Hootesuite is very similar to Tweetdeck but does allow direct access to Fanpages. The free version does limit the number of profiles you can add but for $5.99 per month it allows you too have unlimited. Another bonus to Hootesuite for businesses is that you can allow access to the dashboard of profiles by a team of staff, assign tasks or track results. For most small business’ this dashboard is ideal.

For Mac lovers, there is Socialite which has all the same features as Hootesuite except the statistics tracking. What I do think is a very cool tool in Socialite is the ability to create twitter search lists built around keywords. It means you don’t have to go outside your dashboard to do your research for content. Socialite also allows you to sync with Google Reader, Digg and Flicker to share content. If you don’t use Google Reader to store your RSS feeds then Socialite can do that directly too. This can save you time in going to bookmarked sites or opening Google Reader to go through the latest news looking for content on your business area – therefore saving you time.

Another dashboard that also allows you to create multiple dashboards under one profile is Netvibes. The idea of these dashboards is that they are keyword based and then you add from a list of  many suggested sites where you want to access information from based on those keywords. It does allow you to import your basic profiles such as Facebook and Twitter to then share the research you have found. This dashboard is very useful for doing your research and finding content – especially since it will track the latest news from video sites such as YouTube and Vimeo too.

Lastly is Yoono. The Google owned dashboard is still very new and some of it still in Beta stage but very versatile since it allows you to add your own YouTube account as well as the other big social sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, Flicker and FriendFeed. The list of Beta sites still being tested are AIM, Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk. It’s dashboard is simple to follow and opens up you profiles much like a browser page so therefore I tend to prefer using the Chrome or Firefox Add-On rather than downloading the dashboard as I find it a lot easier to use it while I’m on the internet researching other sites and then posting the content out by opening up the Add-On version than having to wait for the dashboard to open.

I hope this has helped you begin to understand how to create a quick shortcut to monitoring and posting information from various profiles regularly. Not one is better than the other and I don’t have a favorite, in fact I tend to use them all for various reasons. There is also a stack more dashboards to be found if these don’t suit you either, such as Seesmic.

Ultimately, it comes down to what you need and then growing on from that as your knowledge and skills improve and your business’ needs get greater. So enjoy playing – they’re all free to use, have some fun! If you need assistance to set you up or don’t have the time contact me to set it up for you or consider one of my management services starting at as little as $10 a day.

The post Choosing the Right Social Media Dashboard appeared first on Social Media Babe | Lee Ussher.

For a while now I have been consulting with businesses, setting up their social media profiles and training their staff in marketing strategies to help optimise their presence and branding. As the increase of social media marketing evolved so too did my team – expanding my graphics design team to include trained social media assistants providing regular social media management services.

Now I see the opportunity to share my strategy knowledge with other dedicated marketer’s wanting to live in my world and help me consult with clients requesting social media strategy consulting services on contract. There’s only so many businesses I can fit in alone!

Previously, my experience has been mostly in creating campaigns with my business partners at Business Website Marketing Specialists but I have now taken on the adventure to begin my own agency. It is still all the same staff I had trained and contracted to this agency – just now I’m developing my own brand too!

The decision to begin training people to do what I do came from other associates in the web development and online marketing industry. They were using my services for their own clients – contracting the social media to my team to be done for them – but now they have started asking me to teach them what I do – consult and learn from me…

So now I’m opening the door and offering you the same social media strategy training to help teach you to become a Social Media Strategist too! All I ask is that you can display to me that you LOVE investigating and poking into social media sites, love reading and writing on all things social media and willing to share your thoughts on anything new that comes into the social media arena.

This is not a training course that can be done and dusted. This is a career that is forever in a beta stage, but one which you know has a back bone of qualified support to help you grow your own identity. Those that dedicate and love breathing all that is social media, will evolve as specialists within the industry as it grows into the ‘must have’ marketing tool of the future.

So, if this is you, contact me with a little about yourself and links to anything you have already been up to. I’ll be in touch to discuss how both our businesses will benefit from working together.

The post Welcome to my Social Media Strategies World! appeared first on Social Media Babe | Lee Ussher.