Nowadays, there are tons of social media platforms that are free for people to use, and most people are not using only one of them. In this case, when we are facing different platforms of social contacts, we may need some help of managing their own social medias. As a normal person, we don’t need such a person like a social media manager to help us manage our social media, thus we should learn how to deal with these problems by ourselves. As Cawley (2018) mentions in this article, “Even if your time is limited, social media management tools and services can make your social media presence a priority. And if you aren’t making social media a priority at this point in the game, you’re in trouble”. We can say that nobody can get rid of social media, so we would be better to find some tools to manage our social media by ourselves. In Cawley’s article, he gives us a comprehensive guide of how to take advantage of social media management and traverse the media landscape in our own style.
In Cawley’s article, he mentions “do-it-yourself tools are a great way to get started”, and he does show us some useful tools which could help us to “do-it-our self”. He introduces some key elements of social media management:
which gives us a hint of finding a proper tool for ourselves. He also lists some benefit that we may gain by managing our social media properly:
While I was reading this writing, I felt that his article should be mainly focusing on help business to create their professional presence and branding; however, for individuals like us , we can regard ourselves as our own business, then we can truly learn something from his article. It is important and meaningful for us to manage our own social media well; like the topics we discussed before, a well-managed social media could help us to create a personal presence and branding.
Cawley introduced several tools which could help us to deal with the social media management in his article, and I’ve chosen Hootsuite as an example to have a try to the social media management tool. By watching the tutorial video and simply trying by myself, I got some essential understanding about how it works. First of all, by using Hootsuite, you are able to put all of your social media networks in one dashboard, and you could separate different social network accounts by adding tabs on the main dashboard. Then in each tab, you could separate different aspects of your social media by adding columns, this is achieving the purpose of Manage multiple accounts across various platforms, and you could monitor comments and respond efficiently at the same time. Also, you could schedule your posts at a specific time in the Publisher option, and Hootsuite can automatically publish your post at your scheduled time. By clicking the Analytics option, you could receive a comprehensive report of analytics of your social networks. Overall, according to my own experience and watching others using this tool, I found that Hootsuite is a good tool for both personal using and business purpose. While you are using Hootsuite as a social media manager for a brand, institution, group or individuals, just like the guy in the YouTube video, he could make his professional presence and branding well-managed by using Hootsuite. Also, for my own experience, instead of building personal presence, I found that this is helping me with Personal Learning Network issues in many ways. By using Hootsuite, I will not be restricted to a single social media platform; instead, I could gather information from several different platforms.
I’m going to introduce a real-life example of failed social media management which happened in our daily life which has caused an extremely negative influence. I think many people has heard the deadlock between NBA and China these days, and China shut off all business corporations with NBA. All this bad result is caused by Daryl Morey’s (Houston Rockets general manager) tweets about Hong Kong:
I’m not talking about political views here, we can’t simply say that Morey’s point of view is right or wrong, but his tweet did cause an irreversible loss to the whole NBA league, so we can consider it as a failure of social media management. As a public character, his own point of view on his social media are not only representing himself, he’s representing his team and even the whole league. We can never imagine the loss to NBA after they lose the Chinese market, and there is no doubt that Morey can’t be responsible for this loss personally. We are not such a public guy and we may never face such a situation that he’s facing, but this event should truly ring us an alarm. we should pay more attention of manage ourselves properly in order to build ourselves a better personal presence and branding.
Reference:
Cawley, C. (2018). What Is Social Media Management? Retrieved from https://tech.co/digital-marketing/social-media-management-guide
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