With the introduction of social media, marketing and PR campaigns have become more interactive than those carried out over traditional channels alone, such as television and print. Brands can monitor and engage with their fans and followers in real time and assess the success of their campaigns almost immediately. This changing landscape means that keeping organized and responding to mentions in a timely manner is extremely important. In the spirit of this month’s eBook, let’s look at a few ways you can use the engagement console to manage your social media campaigns more effectively.

Manage your social media accounts

Social media campaigns can focus on a single brand channel or be integrated across several. Through the engagement console, you can manage both your brand’s Facebook and Twitter accounts within the same application. You can also manage multiple Twitter accounts, if necessary.

This allows you to respond to comments and questions from your fans and followers, as well as outpost your own content.

When promoting your campaign, you might use both Facebook and Twitter to get the word out. The engagement console also allows you to outpost to multiple channels simultaneously, making managing your campaign outreach more efficient.

Plan your workflow

Before you launch your campaign, determine the post tags and source tags you will apply in the engagement console (you can build off of your brand’s existing playbook for this) and that you will use to assess your campaign’s results come reporting time. Create a unique post tag for your campaign (here, we used “campaignXYZ”) to identify mentions. This can be combined with existing source tags you might have, such as advocate, customer, influencer, etc.

Focus your efforts

When tracking your campaigns, you will most likely get mentions across several media types. Whether you have one person managing your campaign engagement or many, you can focus your efforts to make your mentions more manageable. One way to prioritize is to dedicate separate stacks to different media types. For example, since Twitter mentions require a shorter response time than blogs or other media types, dedicate a stack solely to Micromedia so you can track and respond to them easily. You can also have one stack dedicated to Mainstream News mentions to see what kind of media coverage your campaign is receiving.

In addition to prioritizing by media type, you can use a Topic Profile Trends stack to identify what topics are trending around your campaign. Just remember that the Topic Profile Trends will work best if you have a topic profile dedicated to your campaign rather than a keyword group set up within a larger topic profile. Here, we can see the topics currently trending around Small Business Saturday, which we covered in last Friday’s post.

Monitor sentiment

In addition to media type and trending topics, you might also want to prioritize mentions around your campaign based on sentiment, which is the overarching mood or tone of the post. If you have a topic profile set up around your campaign, be sure to include sentiment subjects in your configuration.

You can then filter your mentions in the engagement console by sentiment and engage with them in real time. Filter by negative sentiment to see where your campaign is missing the mark or filter by positive sentiment to identify your advocates.

Social media campaigns require a coordinated effort when it comes to promoting, listening, and engagement. The above suggestions are some of the ways you can use the engagement console to streamline your interactions with fans and followers, prioritize posts, and keep a finger on how your campaign is being received.

Are you currently leveraging the engagement console for your online campaigns? Are there any other use cases you find valuable for your campaign management that we didn’t cover in this post? Feel free to share!