IT ADVISER

Manage social media with a single tool

Multiple dashboards are available to help you monitor and respond to what people are posting.

By Joe Dysart

Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in Manhattan (www.joedysart.com). His e-mail: joe@joedysart.com.

Ophthalmologists looking for a single tool to manage their social media presence across all networks can take heart: Dozens of all-in-one solutions can help make the most of your presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn et al.

Market research firm Forrester (www.forrester.com) studied la crème de la crème of these social media dashboards and came up with a list of what it considers “strong performers” to help manage virtually ever aspect of your social media needs. They are:

• Sprinklr (www.sprinklr.com).
• Hearsay Social (http://hearsaysocial.com).
• Spredfast (www.spredfast.com).
• Shoutlet (www.shoutlet.com).
• Salesforce.com's Buddy Media (www.salesforcemarketingcloud.com).
• Adobe Social (www.adobe.com/solutions/social-marketing.html).

BEYOND INTERN'S WORK

“The days of letting the intern manage the Facebook page are long gone,” says Nate Elliot, lead author of the Forrester report on social media dashboards, Social Relationship Platforms, Q2 2013.

Kathleen Fealy, president of KF Multimedia & Web, (www.kfmultimedia.com), which designs websites for ophthalmology practices, agrees. “You need to monitor what's being said about your business, doctors and the staff at your practice,” she says.

She notes that niche sites such as HealthGrades.com feature reviews of doctors and their practices. “Besides responding to them responsibly — as if the world is reading your responses — it's important to take steps to fix problems that are revealed, such as waiting times and how the office is perceived,” Ms. Fealy says.

Adds Holly Numan, social media specialist for Glacial Multimedia (www.glacial.com), a web marketing firm that also does work for ophthalmology practices: “Monitoring social media can also help you to discover what your competition is up to.”

WHAT DASHBOARDS DO

While Forrester stresses that none of the dashboards on its “strong performers” list can be considered perfect, most go a long way toward pulling together and managing virtually all the elements of a highly effective and highly interactive social media presence.

Specifically, most of the products Forrester puts at the front of the pack automate the scheduling and posting of text and multimedia across a wide array of social media networks.

Most also enable a medical practice to monitor how its brand is faring on social media — both among casual users of Facebook and other networks, as well as more engaged influencers, such as bloggers. “And once they've tracked customer questions and comments, these tools help marketers analyze which require attention and then allow them to respond to those posts,” Mr. Elliot says.

Moreover, most of the strong performers also automate the processing of social media, including reading and analyzing, and sorting out whom within the practice should respond to a specific post.

MANAGE ALL ACCOUNTS

In addition, these “social relationship platforms” help marketers manage all their social accounts, as well as all the employees permitted to post to those accounts. Most solutions “can assign different permission levels to different employees, and offer workflow tools for routing inbound posts to the right teams,” Mr. Elliot adds.

Plus, most of the dashboards can also ensure that appropriate staff review selected, or even all, outbound posts. The practice lawyer, for example, may want a look at some posts before they go live while a partner may want to fine-tune others.

FOR SMALLER PRACTICES

While the previously mentioned programs are essentially designed to address an extremely wide spectrum of social media needs, smaller ophthalmology practices may be able to get away with programs that are somewhat narrower in focus — and easier on the wallet.

Ian Anderson Gray, a social media consultant at Select Performers Internet Solutions (www.iag.me), says these relatively less expensive programs still go a long way towards managing multiple social networks for ophthalmologists:

• Houtsuite (www.houtsuite.com).
• Sprout Social (www.sproutsocial.com).
• Sendible (www.sendible).
• MusterPoint (www.musterpoint.co.uk).

Other tools have an even narrower focus. Commun.it (www.commun.it), for example, is an excellent tool for managing one's presence on Twitter only, Mr. Gray says. “Commun.it is a social media relationship management tool; it helps you find out who is in your Twitter community — those who support you and your content by retweeting, favoring and mentioning — and those who influence you,” he says.

MONITORING POSTINGS

Feedly (www.feedly.com) is a useful tool for ophthalmologists simply looking to monitor postings on websites and blogs they follow, Mr. Gray says. Essentially, Feedly can be programmed to monitor an individual blog, for example, with a single mouseclick. Headlines from that blog — as well as any other blogs and websites the ophthalmologist is looking to monitor — show up in Feedly's inbox, which looks a lot like the inbox of a typical e-mail interface.

Some of the bigger social networks also offer their own monitoring tools. “We also use the tools provided internally by Facebook and Twitter to review how the accounts are performing,” says Mary Hall, CEO, iHealthspot (www.ihealthspot.com), a firm that designs websites for ophthalmology practices. “The tools are incredibly useful.”

Other tools to check out include Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics/) and Trackur (www.trackur.com).