[GUIDE] Social Marketing On A Budget

Social Media - as an alternative or aside to pure link building SEO. Always seemed like a great idea to me. Less reliance of Google, building brand, getting involved. What's not to like?
Well, other than the fact there is an element of plate spinning involved, it's still something I really REALLY wanted to move in to

My problem was always affordability. I wanted the latest tools to get the job done quicker, I wanted to outsource elements that I was not enjoying or wasn't too good at, but these things tended to cost a fortune.
Starting out, what I really wanted was a simple plan I could use. A step by step guide.
Also, what tools were cheap or even better - free?

I've set up with a great group of talented coders and creative. We need to deal with these clients well. No spam, no trash, professional vigilance etc. You get the idea. So I went looking for a social media management tool (think Hootsuite - Sprout Social etc) and got taken in by how cheap it seemed. Yea under $10! Yay win, $10 per client was fine - $20 - even $30- per client was fine. No worries.

I looked through these tools and found that this advertised price was borderline false advertising. Handling 50 social media accounts for say 5 or 10 clients was going to cost over $1000 a month. Simple, affordable scale-ability these tools DO NOT HAVE.

So I went searching for alternatives. I also wanted a methodology I could use outside the tool to actually handle clients. How to approach them, what if they had previous work done, what if their website existed and was crap? How to add value to their site, how much to charge, where to find content, what work-flow I might use, how to provide reports, what promises to make (or not make).

http://www.demondemon.com/2015/02/1...client-handling-for-agencies-and-individuals/

Over the past few months (some of this actually going back years) I put together a system that works, with tools that are cost effective.
You guys might find it useful

Awesome!

This actually comes to the perfect time. End of the month is the launch of my site, and I still have to prepare my social media strategies.

Thanks a lot!

warm regards,
neocortx

Neocortx said:

Awesome!

This actually comes to the perfect time. End of the month is the launch of my site, and I still have to prepare my social media strategies.

Thanks a lot!

warm regards,
neocortx

Click to expand...

That's pretty much the position I was in a few months ago. I did it all myself "low scale" suddenly I had many more clients, all with multiple channels to manage, and the so called 2big boys" SM management were selling a value proposition at the front end... and a fecking expensive cash drain at the back.

Scritty

So, what is the difference between this and say a bot?

Love your posts scritty as always

jhtweee455 said:

So, what is the difference between this and say a bot?

Click to expand...

The difference between what and a bot? Not sure I get your question.
You can use automation to do different bits of the work (and in the 7 or 8 posts in the series I name a couple of tools I use) not really understanding the question. Sorry - probably my fault.

Scritty said:

The difference between what and a bot? Not sure I get your question.
You can use automation to do different bits of the work (and in the 7 or 8 posts in the series I name a couple of tools I use) not really understanding the question. Sorry - probably my fault.

Click to expand...

No not your fault. It's because I'm noob. I was thinking if it would be more cost effective from using an automated program (bot), as they mostly have one-time fees? But I guess the good thing for some of these are that they are web-based and more convenient.

jhtweee455 said:

No not your fault. It's because I'm noob. I was thinking if it would be more cost effective from using an automated program (bot), as they mostly have one-time fees? But I guess the good thing for some of these are that they are web-based and more convenient.

Click to expand...

Ah, I get you. You can do much of this with automation. However, this is specifically for dealing with clients, high paying ones (think minimum of $1000 a month per client)
These guys want tweets replied to by humans, Facebook likes from people who will really be their customers, LinkedIn shares from B2B businesses, or 2 months down the line they will work out that all the activity on their accounts is "bot made" and quit. This isn't doing social for SEO purposes (which on my own sites I would consider bots for) this is social specifically to get social traffic to your or a clients site

What amazed me was that some of the well known tools like Hootsuite, that advertised under 10 bucks for a pro version, when you look under the lid, it doesn't scale very well at all. Looking at managing 50 profiles (enough for say 8-10 clients0 would cost us well over a thousand dollars a month.

Yeah, you can hot swap logins and all that jazz, but that pretty much defeats the whole idea of the management tool in the first place. Then the reports. The included ones are no better than the free ones you pull yourself, if you want ones with better demographic drill-down - you pay an extra fee ON TOP of the already high monthly subs we worked out it was $8 per report, per client each time they wanted it with Hootsuite.

After costing the whole thing up we ditched them pretty quick and yes, did go for Buzzbundle. Which requires you use your own proxies and doesn't run from a 3rd party server, so if you have posts, tweets etc scheduled, you need to leave your own PC or server (or VPS or whatever you are running Buzzbundle on) running.
In all cases using Excel to parse and format data that the social media site allowed you to download (normally as a .csv file) produced much better reports than the ones these premium social media tools gave.

Hope that answers your query

Scritty

^ Thanks, that makes sense now