Amongst the things business owners and marketing managers are quickly learning about social media marketing are that it’s important — Facebook alone has more than 500 million members and growing fast — and that it’s hard to keep up with.

Between the profiles, updates, tweets, and LinkedIn requests, managing your company’s communications can quickly become a part-time job.

And in fact, in some circles it has.

More and more businesses are relying on “community managers” to keep their social networking communications professional and consistent. Whether they are in-house or a paid vendor, this person is responsible for keeping your accounts up to date, managing the impression you create, and keeping an ear to the ground to see what sort of results you’re getting.

Sound interesting? Here are four things a community manager can do for you:

Keep an editorial calendar. Instead of simply posting messages randomly, a community manager can make sure you hit the right topics at the right intervals by helping you plan ahead.

Post and tweet regularly. We all know how easy it is to lose track of what you’d like to do in a day because you get busy with other tasks. A big part of the community manager’s job is making sure your posts and tweets go online when they should.

Manage feedback. Want to be sure the conversation keeps going? Your community manager can approve and even encourage feedback from visitors to your Facebook fan page and another profiles.

Keeps you updated. Want to know how many followers you have, whether they’re joining at the rate you expected, or if your social media marketing is paying off? These are metrics your community manager can easily gather and report back to you with.

As you probably noticed, having a community manager for your social profiles can be a great way to fill in some of the gaps in your online marketing plan. If you have wanted to do more with sites like Facebook, twitter, and LinkedIn, but can’t seem to find the time, then consider adding one to your team. It could be someone on your staff, and outsourced professional, or a member of your web design/online marketing team. What matters isn’t where they work, but that they keep your social media marketing on track and moving forward.

Want to see better results from your social media marketing? Try working with our team — we have helped dozens of companies in Calgary, just like yours, to turn Facebook friends and Twitter followers into loyal customers.

Most website owners or business managers have gotten at least one of the e-mails in the past few months, and some have gotten dozens: an offer from an SEO “expert” or “marketing company” promising to improve their ranking on Google, Yahoo, and Bing for a negligible fee. And who couldn’t use some marketing help for less than $100?

Just like we all learned as children, when something looks too good to be true, there’s almost always an outstanding reason why. It’s no different with search engine optimization. Here is why: effective SEO requires some expertise, but it tends to be very light on “tricks” and heavy on time. There isn’t any kind of special equipment or software you can buy that will simply handle it for you; it takes a lot of hours, research, and refinement to earn a top search engine spot.

Knowing that time is the main ingredient, ask yourself the next logical question: how much of a professional’s time can you really expect to get for $50-$80 per month? The answer, no matter how you cut it, is always going to be “not very much.”

In search engine optimization, as with just about every other part of life, you truly are going to get what you pay for. Invest the right amounts with the right people, and they’ll pay you back time and again with the increased traffic and revenue that come with a first page results on Google or Yahoo; try to get away cheaply, and you’ll soon find that your website isn’t generating leads for your business. We all wish it didn’t have to be that way, but we also know that quality costs more money.

Remember that the next time a stranger shows up in your inbox promising an online marketing breakthrough for a couple dollars a day. You might get a really great price, but you will almost certainly not end up thinking you got a great deal for your money.

Search engine optimization doesn’t have to be outrageously expensive or complicated. Get in touch with eKzact, one of  Calgary’s best web design and Internet marketing partners today to find out why.