How Technology Helps with Relationships on Social MediaSocial media relationships lead to engagement, engagement leads to action and action leads to sales.

Technology can help or hinder relationships.

You don’t want this to be the first tweet you send!

relationships
Not the best first impression!

 

 

 

 

 

Or…

You don’t want the first tweet or Facebook update to be about selling your services.

Imagine you’re at a networking event and someone approaches you and says, “Hey! Want to buy my stuff?”

It’s not really cool, is it?

Let’s not forget about relationships and the value of those relationships.

chatting

If you want long-term success on social media, you’re going to need to build relationships.

In this article, I’m going to give you practical tips for tracking and managing relationships using technology.

Building social media relationships
The one and only Ted Rubin

Here are 7 ways of using technology to identify, manage and nurture those relationships.

1. Separate people into lists

The internet is a busy place and you will have a growing number of people to stay in contact with.

But it’s impossible to build deep relationships with everyone.

When you add up all your friends, fans and followers it can easily total hundreds, if not thousands, of people.

Dunbar was a guy who did a lot of research around this and worked out that you could not manage more than a couple of hundred relationships..

Dunbar
Dunbar’s work on relationships

So… what do you do?

  • Create a list
  • Add relevant people to the list
  • Track the list

For example,

If you want to track people on Twitter, you can create Twitter lists.  Have a look at Brian Fanzo’s Twitter account and see all the great lists he has created to track relevant people.

People are amazed how Brian can build so many relationships and be so responsive.  His use of technology helps.

Brian Fanzo
A selection of Brian’s lists

You can create your own list or subscribe to someone else’s list.

You can then add this list to tools such as Hootsuite and start tracking and building relationships with people on your lists.

2. Use a monitoring tool to find opportunities to engage

When was the last time you tracked people mentioning your brand name on Facebook and thanked them for mentioning you, sharing your article or similar?

A social media monitoring tool that tracks mentions across multiple platforms is extremely useful.

And it’s important to recognize the people who share out your content.

Consider Brand24, which is a monitoring tool for tracking these type of conversations.

 

View a filter of all messages
View a filter of all messages

 

If you want to build relationships with the influencers who share your content, you can apply a filter to only view the influencers.

3. Track conversations using Nimble

Nimble is a relationship-management tool.

You identify the people who are most relevant in your network and use Nimble to track the interactions you have with them.

It will even give you reminders if you haven’t contacted a person in a defined amount of time.

nimble
Nimble tracking relationships

Nimble is all about social selling.

You identify the right people, build relationships with them and then sales will come.

4. Assess whether you are attracting the right audience

Imagine if you were building a great following but you started to wonder why there was very little engagement?

Maybe you are building the wrong type of audience.

If you are building the wrong audience then you’re not going to build relationships with the right people.

The next step is to take out your analytics tools (e.g. Twitter analytics) and start doing an analysis of your followers/fans to see if they fit the right profile.

You need to attract the right audience to build the relationships you want.

5. Identify the most relevant influencers using tools

Influencer identification and outreach is important because a relationship with an influencer who has access to your potential audience is extremely valuable.

But how do you find the influencers?

There are a variety of tools available that can identify influencers such as Traackr, Klear, Littlebird and many more.

Read this post about social media influencers for more information.

6. Optimization tools for your content

When you create content on your website you want it to appear high in the Google search results.

This helps your business in a couple of ways:

From a brand perspective, if you appear high in the search results for terms related to your business, your customers will have a better impression of your business.

You’ll also drive more relevant traffic to your site.

If you get more relevant traffic then you have the opportunity to build a relationship with a bigger audience and/or identify the most relevant people to build relationships with from that traffic.

7. Livestream and/or Video calls

There’s nothing better than meeting someone in person to build a relationship with.

But…

The next best thing is having a video call with them.

There’s only so much you can do when exchanging Instagram updates, Snapchat pictures or tweets!

When you get to see someone online and interact with them, the relationship changes.

So… find a good excuse to get people onto video to chat with them.

Use Skype or any live streaming service.

 

Summary

Social media relationships are built through finding relevant people and providing value.

Technology can help or hinder the development of those relationships.

I hope in your case it will help.

I’d love to hear your feedback if you’d like to share!

 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

 


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