Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s not enough. Having social media accounts is certainly a great (and quite necessary) start, but if you don’t use them to interact with your current and potential customers, there’s really no point.

Luckily, I’ve picked 3 simple and free social media tools to get you pointed in the right direction:

• OnlyWire: Have a few social media accounts, lots to say and little time? Check out OnlyWire. This tool enables you to post content across multiple social networks at the same time, with the push of a button. The service includes all of the top social and professional networks, and the free version allows for 300 submissions per month. Say goodbye to multiple log-ins and hello to your customers.

• Roost: Use Facebook and Twitter, but not always sure what to post or when? Give your content a boost with Roost. Their free Campaign Creator connects to your profiles, lets you schedule single posts or entire campaigns, and analyzes their reach to suggest areas for improvement. This tool can also apply a fancy algorithm to your Facebook data, spitting out a score that determines whether or not your audience will drive business to your location. It’ll even tell you the geographic spread of your fans.

• Timely: Under the impression that the more times you hop on Twitter and drop your knowledge the better? Timely begs to differ…according to this tool, it’s not about the number of times you tweet, it’s about which times you tweet (however, please don’t forget that first and foremost it’s about the content). Timely will analyze your last 199 tweets, figure out the best time slots, and auto-schedule your posts based on the data. Now you can start dropping that knowledge when it’s most likely to be picked up.

With new social media monitoring tools (many of them free) popping up almost by the day, there should be no excuse for neglecting your networks. Start engaging with your current and potential customers and you might be surprised by the increase in online conversations surrounding your brand.

• YouTube videos are 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google results than a text page
• YouTube is the second largest search engine in the U.S.
• As of February 2011, visitors were spending around 2.9 billion hours on YouTube per month

When you look at the facts, YouTube optimization makes a whole lot of sense. To get you started, here is a great video series that covers everything you need to know about YouTube SEO.

Content Optimization:

• Start Building Content: You should be creating a portfolio of content on YouTube. Plan to build in video with your normal campaigns. But video production is so costly, right? Wrong. All you need is iMovie and an iPhone to start creating content. If that’s too much to handle you can try one of the many screen share tools, an online slideshow creator, or a text-to-video service like xtranormal.

• Keep It Relevant: As you begin creating content, ask yourself this question: “Will this be useful in three months?” If the answer is no, it’s unlikely that your video has real replay value. Try to create content that will be relevant in the future… think long shelf life.

• Do Your Research: Before you begin making videos, do some keyword research using YouTube’s keyword tool. This will give you an idea of which videos will be successful. As an example, if you search “NBA” in Google, you’ll get results on players, news, and game scores, etc. If you search “NBA” in YouTube, many of the top videos will be about dunks, brawls, and highlights. This is a clue that a dunk compilation will likely do much better than a player profile video.

• Competitive Research: Do a normal YouTube search for some videos that are similar to the content you want to create. What is already working? What do people seem to like? What is most popular?

Metadata Optimization:

• Optimize Metadata for Video Search: Your metadata can help you appear in searches and gain traffic, but your content has to be good to experience true success (surprise). However, a well optimized video can help your visibility. Optimize your video title, tags, description, and category to appear in searches. Remember, YouTube search works differently than normal search engine results. If you need some clues, go back to your competitive and keyword research and see which video titles are performing the best. There is a great explanation of metadata here.

• Thumbnails: YouTube thumbnails are automatically chosen near the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 marks. As you create content, plan to have something visually interesting happening at one of these points. Most people will only have a choice between these three thumbnails, so pick the most visually interesting one. In the case that you are a YouTube partner, you can upload whatever thumbnail image you would like.

Video Promotion:

• Leverage Existing Networks: The obvious thing to do is promote your videos on your website, email newsletter, and social networks. Take advantage of any platform where you have the ability to post a video.

• YouTube Promoted Videos: YouTube promoted video ads allow you to target your videos to specific keywords and pay for views. As a bonus, when you run promoted video ads, YouTube allows you to create a call-to-action link on your video, which can be used to drive traffic to another site. There is a great tutorial on how to do this here.

• Annotations: Use annotations on your other popular videos to drive traffic to newer videos. This can easily be done through the YouTube Annotations tool.

• Link building: In many cases, over 40% of views on your videos will come from sites outside of YouTube. Create a plan to reach out to bloggers and other sites, and build embeds of your YouTube videos.

YouTube Community:

• Channel Design: Spend some time on your YouTube channel. A blank YouTube channel is much like a blank Facebook page. Create a color scheme, upload a background, and organize your playlists, subscriptions and other modules.

• Moderation and Response: Keep a close watch on the comments that happen on your videos and your channel. Be sure to answer questions and respond to comments quickly. Treat these folks like you would treat visitors to your other social pages.

• Engage Fans: Videos with more ratings and comments will appear higher in YouTube search results. Within your content, you should encourage fans to rate, comment, and subscribe to your channel.

In our presentation you will find:

• Best practice strategies for growing your Twitter presence
• Tips on how to reach a targeted audience on Twitter
• Twitter tools which can help grow your Twitter followers
• Summaries on the best paid options for promoting your Twitter account

Take a look at the presentation below and feel free to send along any questions you may have.

For our readers who dislike reading, I made a handy screen share video to walk you through the most important changes to Facebook pages. However, if you want the gritty details feel free to read on.

The Five Biggest Changes to Facebook Pages:

1. Layout

Facebook pages are now more similar to user profiles. The big thing to know here is that your tabs and applications have been moved to the left sidebar and the individual icons are now always visible.

Take some time to clean this section up by clicking the “edit” button and removing any unnecessary tabs. You also want to get creative with your application icons. HyperArts has done a really nice job with the icons on their sidebar.

2. Top Five Photos

Facebook now displays the five most recently uploaded photos across the top of your page. In order to keep people from spamming this feature these images appear in a random order. However, there is still plenty of room to get creative.

Take a look at the Room 214 Facebook page where we are using these images to communicate some information about what we do, and how to contact us. I also recently saw a really great example when Nokia hid a playful secret in their top five photos.

3. Settings

The back end of your Facebook page is no longer a complete mess! It is much easier to navigate and better organized.

In the setting area, Facebook has added the ability for page managers to post from their personal profiles. This a really great option for large management teams who want to be a bit more personal in their fan responses.

To change this setting click Edit Page>Your Settings then uncheck the top box.

4. Spam Filtering

It seems to me that few people have been using the new spam filtering feature in the back end of Facebook pages. If you manage a large Facebook community, this will save you dozens of hours.

Click edit page>Manage Permissions and you will see a text box labeled “Moderation Blocklist.” I suggest putting a few keywords like “free ipod” and “free ipad” to automatically block those annoying spam posts.

There is also a new profanity block list feature with three settings: none, medium, and strong. Needless to say, this is a much easier way to filter inappropriate posts from the page.

If you take full advantage of these spam filters you will eliminate hours of scrolling and deleting posts.

5. Use Facebook as a Page

This one is the hail mary for page managers: You can now log in as a Facebook page.

When you are logged in as a page you will receive notifications for every time someone comments or likes one of your posts, or posts to your wall. This will help you stay on top of responding to fans.

Your home feed will now display a stream of posts from other Facebook pages, meaning your brand page can like other pages. I would suggest you use the home feed to keep an eye on the Facebook practices of your competitors, and to keep in touch with friends of your business. In addition, you can feature five of the pages your page has liked from your page.

If you would like to display the pages of your clients, or showcase some of your Facebook projects, click Edit Page>Featured>Add Featured Likes.

You can also comment on other pages as your page! I’m aware of the huge temptation to overuse this feature, so be smart. Don’t over post and stay relevant to the discussions happening on other pages.

Three Common Reasons for Social Media

In our experience at Room 214 we typically see three major reasons organizations dive into social media:

1. Product Development/Feedback
2. Sales/Marketing/Brand
3. Customer Service

Each one of those “reasons” requires its own cast of characters to “own” the process. In addition – each carries unique key performance indicators to measure the health and success of the project. Because function-specific business goals, community value and KPI’s are all different – it’s critical for anyone heading social media efforts in a particular channel to have a clear understanding of the impact measures.

Know Thyself

To steal from Farmer Ted ask: “Who Am I?” In a recent webinar delivered by the Altimeter Group about developing a social strategy one key point was to consider how your company will run things. Will it be Organic, like a Microsoft, where it’s loose and open? Centralized like Starbucks, where it’s controlled by one department? Coordinated like HP, where all departments are participatory but guided by strategy and rules?

The success for a social media program increases significantly when the structure matches the culture – in the beginning that is. As the organizations ingests social media into its culture it will change things – but to begin with – know who you are. Natural leaders will emerge.

Structure Your Team Based on the Golden Rule: You Respond To It – You Own It
The rule is if you respond to an online conversation you own it. For that reason you don’t want PR people responding to a customer service issue because more than likely they don’t have the authority, or resources, to drive resolution. If you’re not driving resolution with customer service issues you’re doing more harm than good.

Conversely you don’t want a product developer in charge of creating a response to an attack (justified or not) on the brand.
Know the conversations happening around your brand and make sure the right people are there to own it.

Ensuring a Common Thread

We do believe Corporate Communications should have intimate knowledge of the organization’s social media activities. Reason: a disturbance in the force requires a quick and professional response. The organization does not want the 24-year old tasked with community management on Facebook stoking consumer ire because they didn’t keep their cool.

Competent Sounding Board

Even if the Corp Com team gets pulled in there needs to be an individual(s) acting as a competent sounding board to provide insight into the rules and structure of the community. This keeps from crafting a response strategy that unintentionally throws fuel on the fire.

So Who Owns It?

Answer the questions:

• What’s your reason for getting into social media?
• How will you measure success?
• What’s your corporate culture?
• What are people saying?
• Who’s got the budget?
• Who’s got the time, energy and willingness to do it right?

Envelope Please
And the answer is: It Depends

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.

- Dr. Suess

….glad you asked though.

After taking a look at the profile images on all seven of the Travel Channel Facebook pages, I realized that there was a way for us to improve the look and feel of our pages. Take a look at a few of the profile images that were displayed at the time:

There were a few issues with each profile image:

1. The formatting was inconsistent.
2. The use of Travel Channel’s logo and brand style was inconsistent.
3. There was room for the images to look cleaner and more official.

Why is the profile image so important?

A profile image is the most used part of any Facebook page. It is the biggest and most noticeable design element when a fan is viewing your page, and it is also appears in the news stream of every one of your fans. If you have an active fan-base on Facebook (like Travel Channel has), there are tens-of-thousands of fans who see this image everyday.

See how I improved our profile images after the break:

Your profile image can send unintended messages (negative and positive) about your brand. When you are exposing yourself to thousands of people in social media everyday, it is important present yourself in the best way possible (In other words: look official).

I took it upon myself to create a new design and I kept a few goals in mind along the way:

1. Create consistent messaging and formatting.
2. Be consistent with the use of Travel Channel’s brand styling.
3. Improve the overall look and feel of the images.

Here is the final result:

In the new design, each profile image uses the Travel Channel logo and brand styling in the exact same way. they help to reduce confusion on the user’s part since the new formatting places the same information in the same place on every image. Overall, the new design is also more sleek and much easier on the eyes.

The old profile images may have been sending an unintended negative message about Travel Channel. Now, every time a fan visits one of the pages it looks and feels like an official representation of the Travel Channel brand.

What did we learn in the process?

Every move you make in social media sends both intended and unintended messages to your audience. This applies just as much to the design of your profile as it does to the content you post on your profile.

Social media users have been in the communities longer than you, and they can point out a faker or a new-comer quite easily. You have to prove to this audience that you understand the medium.