A while back we ran a series on making good use of social media for your insurance brokerage. Today we’d like to take a look at another way of improving your online presence – press releases. Our sister blog recently asked the question; “Why aren’t there more positive stories about the insurance industry?” that’s because we think there’s a huge amount of missed opportunity in this area.

Approaching Press Releases

In order to get press coverage – you need to write a press release. These releases can then be sent to companies that distribute them widely to different media in order for them to use your material.

The trouble with this is that most companies waste their opportunity and investment when it comes to writing a press release. The reason for this is that they focus on marketing. Marketing in itself is not newsworthy. A discount on a product is not front page material, in fact it’s rarely even something that will receive a nod anywhere on someone else’s website and it will almost never appear in print.

Press Releases are for News

News is something exciting. It’s also something current. If you’ve just hired a new CEO – that’s news. If you’ve developed a product that solves a specific market need – that’s news too. If you’ve got a story of how your brokerage has gone the extra mile to help a customer – that can be news as well.

It’s not that press releases aren’t for marketing. They are but the marketing aspect is different. Press releases are a chance to position your company as newsworthy and thus establish additional credibility with your clients. The good thing about online releases is that if other websites run them – they also create backlinks to your website which increases your Google rankings.

We’ll be covering how to write press releases on the SchemeServe blog in the next few weeks if you need help with this but the key point is to remember you need to have something interesting to say before you compile a release.

Distributing Press Releases

Some insurance brokerages may have their own PR teams. If you do then they probably have a list of contacts to distribute releases too. Many others don’t and it can be a real struggle for a small marketing team to develop their own list as it takes time (and money) to develop a list. However, you don’t need to develop a list if you take advantage of a distribution service.

There are a lot of free online press distribution services one of the best known is the one provided through Ezine Articles a company that focuses on article marketing for websites. There are also cheap distribution services like SBWire that allow you to send out dozens of releases a month for a small fee. However, we don’t recommend these services. Why not? Mainly because they’re used by every low-rent internet marketer – high quality media doesn’t take them seriously. These services release thousands (or even tens of thousands) of press releases a day – no-one has the time to go through them all. So they don’t.

PRWeb on the other hand is a much better service. Releases aren’t cheap but they are much more effective if you’ve got a genuinely newsworthy item to share. They offer a targeted database of press leads to mail out to and they even offer industry specific titles to share your PR with. It’s this kind of reach that you’re paying for and a well-crafted press release distributed on PRWeb can bring real dividends to your insurance brokerage. In essence they enable you to position yourselves as genuine experts in the field with a level of thought leadership. Potential clients are likely to see these releases in quality media and associate your offering with that level of quality.

Insurance brokerages looking to improve their profile with clients and get a better ROI on their marketing spend should check out PRWeb and see how they can improve their marketing reach. You could be the first out of the gate and first past the post given the low levels of competition in this area at the moment.

The broking game is definitely less fun than it used to be eh?

Lower premium leads to more customers, more customers leads to less time and less time leads to you running around like a headless chicken. I’d imagine you’re spending no time with your friends and family and probably working yourself into an early grave where you will forever be haunted by the image of insurance software burnt into your retina. Well Riskheads are here to try and ease at least some of the pressure with the top 8 apps, not just for business people, but that serve specific purpose for brokers. Better yet, they can buy you those precious moments to maybe go crazy and take a short lunch break!

1. GENIUS SCAN Free

Ever been out on the road being chased mercilessly by an insurer for a proposal form? Save yourself an unnecessary headache and download Genius Scan to scan the document into your mobile device and forward it straight onto your underwriter.  Not only does it have smart page detection, but it will also correct perspective and post-process the image automatically once scanned – for the less geeky this means it’ll make it look prettier.

2. LINKEDIN Free

As with everything, insurance is a people business and the best customers tend to come from networking and recommendations. LinkedIn has increasingly become the tool for networking with fellow business professionals and now has over 225 million users worldwide, including 77m in the US and 11m in the UK. Functionality continues to improve and you can now use it as a tool for anything from staff recruitment to client prospecting.  Just make sure you take time to understand the privacy settings and aren’t sharing your entire client list with competing brokers!

 3. DRAGON DICTATION Free

Nobody likes typing up their meeting notes after visiting a client, so dictate them into your phone with Dragon Dictation when you get back to the office and let your no doubt excessively expensive handset put it’s dual core processors to good use. Said to be up to five times faster than typing, this free tool can aid busy account executives in ridding themselves of mundane administrative tasks so they can get on with the proper jobs that actually make a difference to their end of year results and target such as ‘networking’ at the local drinking establishment.

4. EXPENSIFY Free

If like me, your wallet or purse becomes an increasingly bulkier mess of receipts as the month goes on, you can sign up to Expensify for free and scan you receipts into your phone, format them in a report and send them straight on to your boss all in a few button presses. This nifty tool will also allow you to capture mileage and even has a multi-lingual ‘smart scan’ for receipts that enables you to avoid the monthly trauma of submitting expenses the old fashioned way and can even be completed on the move. Just got back from a client meeting? Pop the mileage in your phone there and then and don’t worry about rushing it at the end of the month. The fabled ‘paperless office’ is getting closer by the day and even their tagline points to “Expense reports that don’t suck”.

5. GOTOMEETING £29p/m

Coffee breath… M25 traffic… stuffy meeting rooms… eliminate all of these problems by using GoToMeeting to conduct online conference calls instead.  You can save hours commuting to visit clients across the country to buy yourself more time to instead focus on the things that are important to them. Accessible via your smart phone you can share webcams, documents and your even computer screen with the meeting participants meaning that Death by Powerpoint ™ can now even be achieved from the other side of the world. Just hope they don’t integrate smell-o-vision anytime soon.

6. BUSINESS CARD READER PRO £4.99

Don’t be the plonker carrying around a massive leather bound file-o-fax full of all your contact’s business cards; it’s not the 80’s and you’re definitely not Del Boy. Instead, scan them with your Smart Phone with this handy piece of software that automatically recognises the details on the card and files them in your contacts accordingly. Perhaps the icing on the cake is the out-of-the box integration with Linkedin, Salesforce and Evernote. It’s so good that it was even featured in the iPhone TV adverts.

 7. QUICKOFFICE PRO HD £13.99

One of the biggest problems with Apple products is that they’re not exactly best buddies with Microsoft. That means that despite the majority of the broking world dealing in Word, Powerpoint and Excel, iPhone/iPad users are unable to open these files, losing valuable time having to wait to get back to a PC. Well struggle no more; Quickoffice Pro HD is the answer to your prayers and allows full editing of all Microsoft Office documents, spreadsheets and presentations and also allows you to save to PDF, print via AirPrint or access files in the Cloud. In short, problem solved.

8. BOX Free

Steve Jobs once said that “You may not store much before too long” and he was absolutely right, with more and more files being shared over the internet than ever. Even computer games saves and music is being stored in the Cloud these days so why should your work be any different? Box.net supplies such a platform with simple, secure file sharing from anywhere and market leading online security and encryption keeping your data safe. Skydrive alone currently holds 10 petabytes (around 10.5 million gigabytes) online across 17 million customers, so the Cloud revolution is definitely underway. Plus, why waste your hard disk on broking notes when it can be used for humorous videos of cat’s sneezing and the like?!

If you’re wondering what the jawbone and health insurance have in common the answer is probably nothing. If on the other hand you know that Jawbone is a brand and not a piece of your head the answer is “quite a lot”. A little while back we ran a piece on technologies that might be of interest to insurers and insurance brokers. One of the areas we singled out for improvement was health insurance. Here’s how the Jawbone Up can make a difference in this area.

What is the Jawbone Up?

The Jawbone Up is the invention of Hasain Rahman. It’s a wristband that’s chock full of interesting electronic items – that can monitor the health of the user. This is used in conjunction with an application that runs over smartphones that allows users to track other aspects of their life that relate to health; like the meals they eat (which the wristband can’t monitor – yet).

It’s a neat piece of equipment that’s currently targeted at people who want to work on their personal fitness. It’s not ridiculously expensive with an RRP (Recommended Retail Price) of about £109 and it should be available for sale in most Apple Stores.

It monitors a lot of detail from the distance you travel during a day, to your heart rate and it can even generate information about your sleep pattern. It integrates with a range of applications that center on developing fitness or losing weight.

At the moment the benefit to insurer’s is probably minimal. Though someone who is keeping an accurate track of the things they’re doing to be healthy is a goldmine of information for better classifying the risks associated with insuring their health.

The Future

What the Jawbone Up really promises is a better future. While there are a substantial range of neat devices buried within the wristband today in 5 years the technology will have matured and a whole additional bunch of tools should be available. Then the Jawbone Up (or a similar device) will be able to track blood pressure, blood sugar, location monitoring, skin acidity, body temperature, etc. too.

This offers insurers an enormous opportunity to start understanding the true risks of insuring a particular party. Rather than relying on tables of figures to predict a person’s likelihood of severe illness etc. you’ll have the data at your finger tips to do so.

Venture capitalists in the US who are the big investors in Jawbone Up are tabulating a proposal to US insurers to give away the technology to every single person that needs health insurance. This could eventually develop the largest health care information database in the world.

Risk management in the healthcare industry has never looked so easy or so appealing. Imagine the ability to accurately predict any form of morbidity model based on hard, empirical evidence. There’s also a potential secondary market in selling these predictions back to clients and then rewarding them through lower premiums for taking action to reduce specific risks.

Here at Riskheads we’re really excited by the Jawbone Up and we think insurance brokers should be too. We like to think that the EU’s pretty good at addressing privacy concerns around storing data like this which means brokers and insurers on this side of the Atlantic can focus on the upside of the technology without worrying about possible problems in the future too.

Here at Riskheads we’re big advocates of technology for driving opportunities for insurance brokers. In fact in many cases technology is a huge potential boon for insurers of all kinds. However, there’s also a good case to be made for insuring against the risks of that technology too.

The Potential Risks for Cyber-Liability

Data is good. It gives us the ability to make better informed decisions, it allows us to approach our clients on a more personal and tailored level and it enables us to identify trends and either engage with them or avoid them as necessary. It’s the reason that businesses can compete on a global basis because they can use data to adapt to any environment.

The flip side is that holding that data is a responsibility. Your customers trust you to keep their personal information safe and your ability to compete is driven by securing your core business data.

If you lose or expose that data to others – you’ll be looking at liability for that exposure or loss. That’s where cyber-liability insurance comes in. It’s taking off big time in the United States since companies have come under fire for data leaks, etc.

In Europe things are still lagging behind. A survey conducted by Advisen (and sponsored by Zurich Insurance) last year shows that nearly 60% of European companies don’t have cyber-liability insurance. That’s a huge opportunity for insurance brokers to get involved with education and win considerable chunks of new business in the process.

The report that came from that survey suggests that most organizations in the UK and Europe are focusing on risk mitigation. That means they’ve invested in technology solutions to minimize the risks of loss of data and they’ve got plans in place to react to that loss. Yet, they haven’t carefully considered the impact of such a loss or taken insurance to lessen that impact.

The assumption that plans to protect data will always be successful is not a good one. Let’s look at some examples of big names that have lost data in the last few years:

• Amazon – Amazon’s cloud computing services crashed in 2011 and dozens of companies lost data. That’s despite the fact that Amazon has a strong reputation for pulling out all the stops to protect their client’s data.
• Google – Suffered the same problems in 2011 when their cloud computing services wiped data from Google Docs and Gmail. Many businesses are relying on the cloud for additional security but there’s still plenty of potential for things to go wrong.

In fact, the respected IT journalism site, The Register estimates that the loss of sensitive data within the UK has jumped by 1,000 per cent in the last 5 years.

In short British insurance brokers are in a great position at the moment. There’s a big potential market for cyber-liability insurance. It’s one that’s mainly untapped and the only real obstacle in growing that market is a lack of education about the risks involved for the larger business community. With 60% of companies reporting that they haven’t got the insurance and nearly 50% of them not even having it on their road map – isn’t it time your brokerage got involved with keeping the cyber-train on the rails?

Insurers and insurance brokers in the UK are missing out on a range of opportunities to stream line their business models and develop better data for risk management. It’s quite a surprise to realise that British insurers are lagging behind most other industries when it comes to taking advantage of new technologies.

Social Media Data Mining

What do customers want? Well PWC’s report on the Future of Insurance indicates that customers want to choose their point of access to a channel, they want bespoke premium offerings that take into account their circumstances, and they want prices to reflect value in the product.

PWC recommend that you tap into this behaviour. You can use data mining of social networking groups to better assess risks, and gain in depth understanding of how consumers are choosing to purchase their insurance products.

Health Monitoring

As technology becomes cheaper there’s no reason that customers can’t use sensor technology from home to better inform an insurer about their current state of health. This could also enable the early identification of new health problems – saving on liabilities and translating into lower premiums for the client. We wonder why it is that no British insurer is leading the call for adapting this kind of technology to better serve the health insurance market?

Networked Benefits and Policies

Social networks aren’t the only networks of people out there. There’s a trend towards collectivisation in many other areas of finance – such as peer-to-peer and local lending models. Yet, where are the insurers tapping into this trend? The British public is going through times of financial crisis – why aren’t insurers developing policies for student dorms which can be shared (at a lower cost than insuring individually between all the students there? Or business insurance policies that allow a group of shop holders or office users to collate their needs into larger policies with lower overall premiums?

Open Comparisons

It’s no secret that people shop around for their premiums but why is it that a customer can use an online portal for a comparison but can’t get one from their broker in many cases? If you were to offer similar comparison technology on a sales portal for your insurer – you could then objectively compare benefits and demonstrate the value in your offering. It’s a simple way to help the customer make a decision without having to trawl round a dozen brokers. It’s also a good way to ensure your products are competitive.

Smart Phones

OK, there’s been a bit of a move in the right direction such as the Aviva application that we covered a while back – that gauges a driver’s driving to calculate premiums. However, there are plenty of other insurers who haven’t made the move yet. That’s despite the technology being easily available and cheap to adapt (in comparison to developing it from scratch). Insurers could also monitor the use of vehicles throughout a policy lifecycle and as importantly where they are used – to better calculate risk for future policies.

All told UK insurers and brokers need to catch up with the times. Technology could offer a serious competitive advantage and many of the ideas above also offer retention strategies for reducing customer acquisition costs. Here at Riskheads we think there’s a strong case for early adoption of these technologies which have been tried and tested in other industries and bring proven benefits. Leading the charge could leave you out in front for a long-time to come.

In another shock anti-discrimination move the EU rule that from 11th June 2013 it will no longer be legal to discriminate based on postal area / postcode.

The move was inspired by a recent executive lunch in Brussels in which one diner observed that insurers are using postcode to rate some premiums cheaper for specific consumers while expecting others to pay more.

The European Commission declined to comment to RiskHeads but we managed to invent the following very likely quote: “We think everyone should pay the same price for their insurance; even serial claimers and criminal gangs deserve a fair chance when purchasing car insurance online.”

This latest announcement follows similar changes regarding sex and age based rating.

Insurance organisations across the country were up in arms:

“Without the ability to rate based on postcode, how will we know who the bad guys are?”
–Roger Baggnakton, Aviva

“Some postcodes are really dodgy. I wouldn’t go to Nottingham’s NG1, would you?”
–Elvis Marteen, NIG

“I was thinking about taking the wife to Brussels next year.”
–Burt Badgerton, Airfix Model Appreciators Inc.

At first glance liability insurance seems simple enough. You take out a policy and in the event that a claim is made against you then you call the insurer and have them resolve the issue. However, first glances can be misleading.

Consider this scenario; your business is plumbing. You’re asked to deliver a contract for the plumbing for some new build houses. Five years later one of the houses floods and it’s alleged that you were negligent in performing your duties. Over the previous five years you have changed insurers three times to get better value for your premium. Which of the three insurers now has to deal with the claim? Your current insurer? The insurer at the time of the work? The insurer who you were with when the damage was occurring?

Claims-Made vs Occurrence Insurance

The answer to those questions is complex and it really depends on the kind of liability insurance you have (and had).

If your policy is on an occurrence basis then the claim is handled on the basis of which policy was in force on the date of the event causing the loss. This is true even if that policy has expired. So in the case of our plumber – if their insurance is on an occurrence basis it’s the insurer they were using when they did the work that they need to sort out their claim.

A claims-made policy on the other hand is triggered by the date that you are first made aware and notify your insurer of the claim (or indeed potential claim).

Claims-Made vs Occurrence Insurance for Insurance Brokers

For insurance companies the occurrence insurance is the simpler of the two kinds of insurance to generate. However, it has the disadvantage that the profit and loss on the policy can’t be reported quickly (potentially for decades) as the insurer has to be confident that no claims will be made against the policy before reporting on it.

Claims-made insurance on the other hand allows for a much simpler balancing of the books. When the policy expires the insurer can report the income (or loss) from that policy.

There are challenges associated with writing claims-made policies. In that they are more complex than occurrence policies. There is also the potential of a client being left without coverage because they fail to notify the insurer properly during the period of cover. In our plumber’s case his insurance might be nearing expiry when he hears that there’s been some damage on the new build home. Because he’s not certain that it has anything to do with him, he doesn’t tell the current insurer. Then when he is certain and tells the new insurer they reject the claim because he should have told the old insurer there was a potential claim. The old insurer no longer insures the plumber and won’t take the claim either.

Making a claim under a claims-made policy

There are in essence three triggers for a claim under these policies:

• The insurer must receive notice of a claim (or potential claim) during the coverage period
• The act of negligence, omission or error that gives rise to the claim must have occurred after the retroactive data that was specified in the policy
• The insured party has to make a “good faith” statement that they had no knowledge of the mistake before or on the date that coverage was purchased

The retroactive date is a key component of claims-made insurance. It’s something that needs to be keenly negotiated between the insurer and the insured party when they purchase the policy. Any acts, occurring before that date, are not insured. The ideal retroactive date for the insured party is the date that the first began providing services or the earliest date (under law) that they might be held liable for an incident. Brokers and insurance providers on the other hand need to be certain that the risk is reasonable and may not wish to extend coverage to these dates if the party has no prior insurance or has major gaps in their insurance coverage to date.

Reporting requirements also need to be strictly defined in the policy and the insured party needs to be made aware of these and their obligation to comply. An “awareness provision” is common (given the length of time it takes for claims to develop and be resolved) which requires the insured party to notify the insurer whenever there is a possibility of a problem.

Claims-made policies have a simple objective but can be extremely complex to develop. It’s vital that both insurance brokers and insured parties have a strong understanding of exactly what is involved and what is required from each party. Risk-management for a business requires that their liability insurance provide adequate protection in all scenarios. It’s simply a matter of putting the pieces together properly.

In any other industry the idea, that two thirds of a company’s clients were only a drop of a hat away from signing up with a competitor, would be shocking. In insurance it seems to be a standard according to Cap Gemini’s World Insurance Report for 2013. They carried out over 16,000 individual customer surveys and drew their data from 41 markets and 114 senior insurance people. Their conclusion is that nearly 70% of insurance customers would switch to another provider for minimal or even no additional benefits.

The Basis of Customer Experience

In essence the customer experience is defined by three areas of the customer lifecycle:

1. The contact a customer has with other people or companies regarding a single company or product
2. The company’s own sales and marketing efforts and following a sale the support function of that company
3. The customer’s use of the service itself

The Customer Experience Management Process

In order for insurance brokers to effectively manage the customer experience they need to understand the underlying management process. That is:

• Being able to monitor the path of a customer throughout the customer experience lifecycle
• Bring together data from every channel and touch point that influences the customer experience lifecycle
• Properly integrate data from external sources with data that is generated from the insurance broker’s own departments
• Focusing on improving the overall quality of revenue streams (and thus profits) gained from customers within the customer experience lifecycle
• Optimising internal processes so that they are focused on the customers and not on the broker’s preferred business model

The purpose of customer experience management is to create a positive association in the customer’s mind with your brand and your product offering. CAP Gemini’s report is quite clear that it is neutral and/or negative customers which are most at risk.

One of the easiest ways to improve the customer lifecycle is to integrate with the way customers live. The report focuses on social media and mobile applications as a specific way to improve interactions with clients and improve their experience of your overall service. If you’re looking for ideas in this area you might want to see our recent series regarding social media for insurance brokers.

The key factors in these two contact points are the ability for your customer to interact with your brand anywhere at any time and do so in a social setting. The right levels of engagement should deliver much higher levels of retention. Two-thirds of your client list being at risk is not acceptable – the cost of gaining new customers is always markedly higher than retaining original customers. The CAP Gemini report suggests there’s a lot of work to be done in this area. Are you letting your customers spiral away from you? What can you do to improve their experience?

Insurance brokers invest a lot of time and money in their IT infrastructure. However, despite the last decade seeing an enormous amount of effort devoted to managing portfolios, ensuring that legal and regulatory requirements are met through automation and a sincere focus on getting better information from reports; there’s still a lot of work to be done to ensure that brokers receive value from their spend.

Key Value Drivers for the Next 10 Years for Insurance Broker Software Systems

• The level of competition – competing solely on price offers no value add and is ultimately unsustainable. Insurers need to examine their whole delivery model from end-to-end and work out how to reduce the total cost of their business processes and how to better meet emerging patterns of consumer behavior.
• Customer demand – technology needs to support client requirements. It should support self-service (for maximum efficiency) whilst still driving cross-selling and a variety of sales and delivery channels.
• Clear decision processes – IT systems for brokers must provide data to support the corporate decision making process. This data should be compatible with data provided from 3^rd party sources for maximum effect.

Current Blocking Issues

• Complex Legacy Systems – As insurance product portfolios have developed, legacy systems have been endlessly tweaked to try and meet the complexity of modern insurance needs. These systems have often become so complex that extracting useful data becomes time-consuming and effort-intensive. This also has an impact in terms of the risks of implementing further changes which delays putting improvements into practice and that costs money.
• IT relationships – technical environments often become closed off from the wider decision making process. It is often easier to explain the benefits of additional hardware than it is to have an honest conversation about changing core platforms.
• An excess of data – the more data that is produced from legacy systems the more that data is shared without addressing the key question; “What will that data be used for?” Decision makers can find themselves drowning in volumes of data which doesn’t answer any specific questions or drive rational progress.
• A lack of benchmarks – there have been improvements in this area of late but there’s still a lack of actionable data from benchmarking. Benchmarks should identify both problems and potential solutions.

What can be done to improve the situation?

• Cost driver analysis – most businesses fully understand how much they are spending on IT and what they are spending it on. Many however, cannot fully articulate why they are spending in the way they are.
• Decision making process alignment – Once you know why you are spending the way you are, you need to ensure that decision makers can use that data in context to improve service-levels and reduce the overall level of risk. This needs to be fully aligned to the bottom line.
• High-level support – The senior team need to be able to support this decision making process and ensure that it remains a priority in budgets and balance sheets.
• Real-time useful data – This should lead to systems that produce accurate real-time reports that offer service, financial, operational and general IT metrics that can be compared to benchmarks. This is the only way to ensure that your IT spend is producing value.

Did you know that nearly 5% of most brokers’ outward investment is spent on their IT infrastructure? Yet only a tiny fraction (if any) of that is spent on calculating the true business value of that investment? If you want to ensure that your insurance broker is really getting the most from your IT spend – you need to spend some time working out how to quantify that and work out exactly how you’re going to support the needs of tomorrow’s customers. You shouldn’t need a crystal ball to make the most of things.

Managing social media for your insurance brokerage can be enormously time consuming. The problem is that in order for a social platform to feel “social” you need to generate regular content and ensure that it drip feeds at the right level to your audience. This is compounded by the problem of most social media platforms offering no scheduling options – e.g. with Facebook you hit the post button and the content goes live immediately, you can’t ask it to hold the data until Saturday for you.

Fortunately it doesn’t have to be that way. There are several automation tools that can help you ensure you’re always connected to your audience without being always connected to a seat in front of your PC.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is the grand-daddy of all automation products for social media. You can manage Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Myspace, WordPress, Google+, and countless other networks using their App Directory.

The good news is that it is free to try. However, you’ll almost certainly want to consider a paid option so that you can upload Excel files to do mass scheduling of posts rather than creating each one individually.

The learning curve can be a little sharp for non-technical newbies but once you’ve mastered Hootsuite your social media scheduling becomes a piece of cake.

Buffer

Buffer is similar to Hootsuite and some folks swear by it. It’s a very simple way to upload posts, pictures and videos to the main social networking sites on a schedule. It works as a browser extension so you’ll be very familiar with the controls.

You can try if for free and the long-term outlay is only $10 a month which is pretty good value for taking all those headaches away.

Triberr

If you’d like to grow your audience quickly and through relevance then Triberr might be the answer. It’s essentially a blogging network that lets you link with communities (by invitation only – but you can request an invite). Then every time you put up a blog post the rest of the community is notified. It’s a great way of extending the reach of quality content to the right kind of reader.

Social Mention

This free to use tool allows you to track what people are saying about you online from multiple different sources. If you want to stay on top of conversations so that you can enjoy the positive feedback and protect your reputation  when things aren’t so positive – Social Mention’s the perfect tool, and it’s extremely simple to use.

IFTTT

IFTTT means “if this, then that” and it allows you to create rules that work between social media platforms. For example; if someone follows you on Twitter it could generate a quick response thanking them for doing so and point the way to your Facebook profile. Or it could ensure that every video you upload to Youtube or image you place on Instagram is then backed up automatically in DropBox.

It’s a much more complex tool than the others but don’t let that put you off – there are dozens of user created recipes you can use for free that will have many of the rules you want already developed for you.

There are many other automation tools for social networking but these are the main tools that will get 95% of the job done with much less effort. Once you’re up and running you can then concentrate your social media efforts on engaging with your audience and building up your sales and customer care platforms around them.

Don’t forget: Just because you’re automating some of the hard work – it doesn’t mean you should take a cookie cutter approach to content. It needs to remain interesting and engaging no matter how it is uploaded.

If you’ve enjoyed this article you can catch up with the rest of the series here:

Part 1 – Choosing Your Platform

Part 2 – Developing Your Metrics

Part 3- Understanding Your Reach and Influence

Part 4 – Developing Your Content Strategy

Part 5 – Your Editorial Calendar

Part 6 – Keeping it Social