Managing Social Media Activity Through Your Email Inbox

From the WIRED ADVISOR™ e-Marketing Toolbox

Using social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter offer many opportunities for financial advisors. From building a credible online presence to connecting with existing and potential clients, joining niche groups, and accelerating introductions and referrals, social media is quickly becoming the “relationship marketing” choice of today. There are many tools available to help you manage and monitor your social media participation, but it is far too easy to find yourself spending significant time within the social networks if you are not strategic AND disciplined with the way you manage your engagement.

Investing Time In Social Media is Critical to Success

In order to really have an impact with social media, let’s face it, you must invest the time and you must do so consistently. Time is a limited resource and something we’re always searching for more of. Success in building and fostering relationships through social media requires that you participate daily within the networks where your clients and prospects exist. In order to minimize the time commitment and maximize your efforts of building deeper connections, you must have a disciplined approach when participating in social media or you run the risk of spending countless hours online. Time spent without laser focus will not result in a profitable investment.

The Ultimate Social Media Time Manager – Nutshell Mail

If you have not heard of or experienced Nutshell Mail, it is a tool for managing “real time” social media activity on “your time”, and it’s free! I’ve been using the platform for about a year and after experimenting with other alternatives, it continues to be my number one application of choice for monitoring online social media activity on the go. Nutshell Mail allows you to organize, monitor, and even interact with all of your social networks from a consolidated email digest and delivers it directly to your inbox of choice on a schedule that you choose. Perhaps you are unable to “interact” with your social networks at work? You can still receive your email digest of activity and stay informed without skipping a beat!

With Nutshell Mail, you have complete control over most of your activity from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter that you pull into your personal email digest. With each of these networks, you can select what you would like to see. For example, with LinkedIn you can view status updates, group activity, and recently connected friends to name a few.

With Facebook, you can pull in your news feed, inbox messages, friend requests, birthdays and wall posts. In addition, you can pull in activity from the various Facebook Pages that you subscribe to, including any pages that you administer.

With Twitter, you can review new followers, quitters, direct messages, mentions, search terms and lists.

For each of these networks there are many options and filters that you can customize for your particular needs when building your personal digest within Nutshell Mail.

How I Use Nutshell Mail

Although I can interact and engage directly from my Nutshell email digests, I use another application for that process the majority of the time other than for a quick “retweet” or “reply”, or maybe a “birthday wish” to a Facebook friend.  The point is, the Nutshell email digests make it simple to post quick updates to your networks, but it is not a full-blow social media management and monitoring tool.  For the days that I am too busy to be living on the social networks for any extended period of time, Nutshell is invaluable.

Within my personal Nutshell Mail account, I’ve set up filters for each of my social networks so that I only receive relevant activity that I want to stay updated on. I can also monitor the financial advisors in the Wired Advisor Network to see exactly how they are engaging and implementing the social media coaching they have received. With Twitter, I follow the lists that I’ve created of thought leaders, financial advisors, and industry experts in addition to reviewing my new followers and any direct messages or mentions from others.

I’ve scheduled my Nutshell digest to deliver 3 times daily; mid-morning, after lunch, and late afternoon. Each time the email arrives, I stop what I’m doing, quickly review the activity, and decide how I will engage from there. I may take a few notes of the items worth sharing with my connections and groups, and even click on some of the links that my connections have suggested in order to bookmark them for review at a later date. It takes no more than a couple of minutes to quickly scan all of the social media activity that has taken place over that particular time period.

The true power of the Nutshell Mail tool is time management. Without the benefit of the aggregated social media email digests, you could find yourself spending hours upon hours in each of the social networks. It is simply too easy to get pulled in and waste significant time. Nutshell Mail allows you to stay engaged and relevant within your social networks while efficiently managing your time.

What Could Be Improved?

I am hopeful that Nutshell will find a way to integrate LinkedIn Group “updates” as well, in order to quickly scan discussions and commenting in all of the groups that you are a member of.  Also, I feel that they really need to produce an Iphone and Ipad app.  You can access Nutshell emails on both of these devices through your email client and/or browser, but I find it to be cumbersome trying to adjust the screen on my Iphone for example.  Some of the other monitoring tools that do have apps are much more pleasing to the eye and easier to navigate.

Recently Nutshell Mail was acquired by the email marketing firm, Constant Contact. It will be interesting to see how these firms integrate their services. Have you tried Nutshell Mail? Please share your feedback with us!

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