Star Command: Social Media Style

Social media is continually growing as a key element of successful marketing and advertising. Because of this, businesses and professionals who do use social media need a strategy to keep up with all of their profiles, posts, mentions, comments, etc. Without a strategy for your social media management, you won't get far. One way companies are managing their online presence is through social media command centers. Yes, social media command centers. Sounds pretty cool, right? If you're like me, when you heard the words command center, you probably thought of the Space Mountain Command Center (seen below) from Magic Kingdom Park. Anyways...

Companies today are continually building and using social media command centers to help monitor all of their sites at once. Social media monitoring is important for the following reasons:

• Allows you to discover conversations happening in real time. This way, you can reply to comments or questions immediately, creating a strong connection with your audience.
• Allows you to understand your audience better.
• Helps you determine what content works best and doesn't work at all with your audience.
• Helps you discover which content your audience is most engaged with.
• Makes a connection with strategies and objectives of a social media campaign.

These social media command centers are a great investment for businesses wanting to have a better way to control all of their social media sites. All a social media command center really requires is a few TV screens, computers, and the wires needed to hook them together. The American Red Cross, Dell, and even the 2012 Presidential campaigns use social media command centers to manage their social media sites and receive the benefits of having them.

So, if your business isn't quite keeping up with all of its social media, think about building a social media command center. You'll only benefit from it if you do! And, you'll be able to pretend like you're Buzz Lightyear when you talk to your coworkers by saying things like "We have a new comment, Space Ranger!" or "This is *insert your name* of Social Media Star Command, do you read me?" Or at least I would. :)

Thanks for reading and have a magical day!