Thread: How to choose a Social Media Manager?

Here are some tips to help you choose the best Social Media Manager.

1. Content management system features
We often think of a "CMS" in the context of a major corporate site, but it's just as important in a social media management platform -- perhaps even more important -- because the need for constant updating is so acute in social. Here are some features to look for as you weigh alternatives.

• Ability to deliver content to lots of social platforms: As with anything else, you are going to want to work with a versatile platform. Because social is so dominated by Facebook and Twitter, it may be OK to work with a Facebook- and Twitter-only tool now, but make sure the tool is planning to cover more platforms in the future. If there is one certainty in social network history, it's that market hegemony isn't forever. Ask Compuserve, AOL, Napster, Friendster, and MySpace. Further, you should be able to choose social media destinations for each piece of content because what you send to Digg should be very different than what you send to Facebook. The easier it is to decide where a particular piece of content goes, the happier you'll be in the end.

• Ease of content creation: Some platforms allow you to create content right in the platform. Is the process easy, or is it complex? Intuitive, or convoluted? Easy is going to be important to any social manager, but for people managing multiple brands, or multiple presences for a single brand, it's going to be critical. The number of steps required for content creation is important because social managers are going to spend only a small portion of their time creating content. Most of their time should be spent listening and responding.

• Page aesthetics tools or helpers: Some social media presences open themselves to more custom tailoring of page appearance. Having ways to quickly and easily alter the aesthetics of a page can help brands reinforce messaging with their proprietary look and feel. Some services offer easy-to-use tools, others don't. If you don't have designers on staff, easy-to-use tools can be a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that you won't have to involve a designer every time you make a small change. A curse because most non-designers have a knack for shocking colors and turning on the wet floor, shadow, outline, and ripple effect simultaneously. Ask our team what it's like to deal with two color-blind partners. LOL.

• Post aesthetics and content helpers: There's probably a cooler name for this, but what I am talking about is the ability to post content and ensure that a screen shot or key image is posted, not just a link. And the ability to change the text of a post is also useful. Similarly, an automatic URL shortening tool helps immeasurably. Instead of making trip after trip to Bit.ly, you can just have the platform do it. Some solutions also let you customize the shortened URLs to give you an additional level of brand impact.

• Collaboration: Two things to look for here. The first is the ability to create, edit, and manage content across people within an organization. Ideally, a platform lets content developers input their work, and then manages the flow of edits, updates, and approvals across an organization. Permissions capabilities are going to be important here for many companies, especially those to the left of the "risk-o-meter." Obviously, the need for fail-safe procedures and processes varies somewhat depending on the size and type of organization. For example, a large company in a highly regulated category like pharma would probably want features that prevented posting of content without prior approval from legal, etc.

thanks for sharing these awesome ideas dude

Social Media Messenger is best way to make communication between clients and company . Generally we user skype , email chat and other types of communication medium

use chatting tools , twitter facebook effectively to get the desired result

I m very impress with your content, If any person having these quality can be a good SMM where he work as chain between company and customer.

nice tips alex.