Now that you have your one or more accounts set-up, it is time to talk about managing your resources in order to provide on time consistent valuable content.

While it is cheaper to utilize SM technology to reach out to others, there are many factors which need to be taken into account. Maintaining a public facing SM site could eat up a lot of resources. This is why you will need to pay close attention to your end goal and be as specific as possible in what you want to communicate. Doing this will help you streamline your efforts and make sure you are utilizing your resources effectively. Remember, SM utilization is no different than advertising. You need people to see your message and they need to see it several times before they will follow. Just because you build it – does not mean they will automatically follow. You have to be committed (not to a hospital) to a consistent approach. You will not build a consistent following if your posting is sporadic (once every 4 ,5,6 days). Once you have a mass following they will want to hear from you as much as possible. Give your customers what they want! Below are a few things to think about when allocating your resources.

The resource areas you will need to take into consideration.

1. Setting-up and managing the IT side of things: Who will do this, how many SM sites will be required to set-up? What about technical difficulties – who will contact support. Who will find out how to build a B2B or B2C customer facing page (uploading pictures etc)? These are all very important steps to consider as this will be the back bone of your SM service.

2. Once you have your IT taken care of, how often do you plan to post? Who will do the research necessary to provide relevant information? How up to date do you want or need your SM site/s to be?

3. Now that you have a posting frequency plan. Who will create the content to be posted? What “official company” guidelines do you have to make sure relevant content is provided? If you don’t have any guidelines, maybe you should think about creating some. The last thing you need to is to plagiarize and be caught. Talk about a credibility killer. Trust is very hard to earn, but very very very easy to loss!

4. Customer inquires/feedback: How will they be handled? Will you respond to them daily, every other day or when? If someone asks a question or makes a strong comment, they “really”do want to have a response. You should respond as quick as possible since their feedback will, or at least should be viewable to the public. The public is watching to see what you do. By not answering timely or providing a quality response, you could lose their trust as well.

5. You do not need to assign one person to each responsibility. You could create a collaborative team effort. This would cut down on the time needed at an individual level, thus allowing for a smaller time commitment from each participating team member. This would also provide a more effective way to manage and provide fantastic relevant content on a timely and consistent basis.

Hopefully you have enjoyed today’s lesson and your brain has received many quality questions to ponder. So sit down right now, put pen to paper and layout your content strategy plan.

Next time we will talk about creating content programs. Stay tuned to your RSS feed for Marketing/Social Media Tools.