According to a research done by AAL, there are a billion social media experts on the internet. Do you know what do they do on a daily basis? After “interviewing” more than 20 (actually none) experts, this is what I found out.
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Oh no, not another 2012 social media trends prediction post. This is different because I have time travelled back from the future to warn you about what is going to happen this year. Hopefully, telling you this won’t change the future and causing ‘ the butterfly effect’ to happen. It was scary enough to see Ashton Kutcher “almost” giving a guy a….. you know what!

So what’s big this year? Almost the same as last year, actually. However we’ll see a few areas which will be more concentrated than others.
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There are ongoing debates about hiring an intern to handle your social media presence or to handle your companies social media account. Some may say that they should hire an intern because they know Facebook, and because of that they will make them a great social media manager as they are the experts.

However, that is not true, although most of these teenagers really do know how use to Facebook of course, they use it for personal reasons such as relaying their movements to their friends, connecting, posting news updates, and stalking other peoples’ friends . (Don’t pretend you don’t do this!). I imagine very few interns use Facebook for business usage.

Interns don’t use Facebook for business; they use it to look at chicks in bikini pictures – @garyvee

Hiring an intern or getting them to do all your social media activities is a bad idea, due in part to their lack of the foundation, such as crafting and creating a social media strategy document, as interns lack the basics that marketers have years of knowledge and business experience doing. However, it may not be a bad idea to get an intern into the team, although these people don’t understand marketing or strategy, they do understand how Facebook works and can give examples of how they have participated and may help in crafting a social media campaign for your brand.

Last year, I met Kathleen Tan, AirAsia’s regional head of commercial at iStrategy Singapore where she spoke, and I got to learn from her that she learns Facebook from her niece and nephews. At Media Contacts Singapore, the company which I had my internship with, makes an effort to learn and ask questions from their interns. We combine teamwork with the generation-Y to understand social media such as the function and features. Top management learns from the generation-Y and the generation-Y learns from them.

FIVE REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD HIRE AN INTERN:

1. They understand conversations. Conversation works on social media. Don’t market to your customers, instead talk to them in a conversational way and interns can help you with that.

2. They can make good community managers that can help you to respond to people. However, you will need to make sure that the posts are approved by a supervisor. You shouldn’t depend on an intern to monitor your feed after work, just in case of an emergency. Have a team!

3. Interns bring fresh ideas into the team. Although the ideas may not be perfect, it can be polished by your marketing team who has more experience.

4. You can use your intern to come up with a content calendar for your profiles on social networks. They can do a few months in advance like what we had done for one of our clients. An intern wrote an amazing three month content calendar for one of our clients.

5. They are fast learners and (presumably) passionate.

FIVE REASONS NOT TO HIRE AN INTERN

1. Interns aren’t forever, they may leave the company after their internship. They might return to school or join another company.

2. Interns don’t understand your company or product when they join.

3. Interns don’t understand metrics or KPIs or they have not had much experience with it or simply don’t have business or professional experience.

4. Interns won’t monitor your social media presence 24/7 as they may not be around after their work is done.

5. Interns can’t handle responsibilities; it is the top managers who handle the responsibilities.

Some businesses recommend you hire an intern because they are cheap, but that is not the best way to compete as you still need competent and skilled people who have the experience to compete on a marketing level. However, interns make a great team when they are guided by experienced people. The topic is open, should companies hire social media interns?

This blog post was Sponsored by Sprout Social. A Social Media Management tools that enable you to find new customers and to grow your business

While browsing Youtube videos, I stumbled across a video by @Garyvee which caught my attention. Before I share the video with you, here are some of the key points which I found out from the video.

In the video, Gary talked about how businesses today handle social media and one of the things Gary noticed was that businesses are like brides, they spend more time and effort planning the wedding than they do once they are married. He also mentioned that businesses today don’t think lifetime value can be achieved from social media.

Here is the video:
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Sure you can build your brand on social media, I mean everyone is able to build a great brand on social networking sites right? WRONG! If you’re doing it wrongly it may even hurt you in the long run, take US Airlines for example who decided not to respond to customer’s enquiries on twitter. The best part was they decided to respond to a celebrity on twitter and ignored other tweets. Tsk tsk! picky picky!

Its time to wake up and smell the coffee and see that social media might not be for you or its not going to save your brand. Social media may not help you  if you (more…)

In today’s focus Friday, we look at the importance of responding to tweets. Depending on the industry you’re in, some tweets require quicker or faster responds. According to eezeer, 85.9% of tweets to airlines are customer service related, therefore if you’re not responding, chances are you’re losing your customers TODAY. To support that, a report by Mediapost, show that 18% of those who posted a negative review of the merchant and got a reply ended up becoming loyal customers and buying more.

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Without customers, your business will never survive, I was inspired by a blog post by Ian Lurie, where Ian wrote about nice things that businesses can do for their customers, so I decide to write about how you can do nice things for your customers with the help of social media. In no particular order, here are some ways I think you can use social media for your customers.

1) Respond to your customers. This is one of the most important things you can actually do, some people are asking you question because they are interested. You’re actually losing customers when you don’t respond.
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Stop spamming everyone on Twitter!

You have a great product, a great start-up that can do wonders, a real prospect, now how do you promote that? Social media experts will tell you to post it on Twitter, and then millions of people will flood your new business. Of course if you’ve been on Twitter for a while, you know that it is not true. Now how about sending EVERYONE the same message? Asking them to take a look at your business? This is what happened to me today. It’s like holding a megaphone and shouting to everyone that passes you by, see me, see me! Visit my store!
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Everyone uses Twitter differently, and I can’t really tell you what it is about generally. However, I can tell you what Twitter is to me, personally. It is about connecting with people (guess you figure that out). It’s about building new relationships with people that you’re not able to do on other social networking sites, for example, when being on Facebook we tend to be inside our own circle of friends. Unless we connect with them on twitter first, then we might be able to grow our network on facebook.
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There isn’t any official number of how many users there are on Twitter, but I “think” I have managed to find the answer. Still, I could be wrong, but then again I could be right. However I feel that  it’s fairly accurate (i’m confusing I know).  Nicholas Carlson wrote an interesting post on how many users are active on Twitter, where he explained the amount of people who are active on Twitter, people who aren’t following anyone etc, but I wanted to know how many Twitter users are registered today.

Twitter is not like Facebook, where we are able to get data from socialbakers to find out the amount of Facebook users or the amount of Facebook ads.
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