What’s the point of being on social media?

So many business owners are busy on social media with any plan or purpose. They’re not clear why they are posting, why they are connecting with people or how social media can really help them.

If this is you then it’s worth asking yourself some questions:

1. What do you want to achieve from being on social media?

2. Who do you need to be interacting with to achieve it?

3. Where do those people hang out online?

4. What will they be interested in hearing about?

5. Does your business provide it?

6. Are you creating calls to action aligned to 1?

7. Are you measuring results?

8. What resource/time/skills to you have to dedicate to this?

9. How much time and money can you afford to spend on this?

Here are some reasons to be active on social media and what you need to do to capitalise on your goals:

#1: Increase Brand Awareness

Social media is a great way to spread the word. Facebook alone has 1.94 billion monthly active users. Whether you’re selling skincare products or IT outsourcing services, your business would most likely benefit from a strong social media campaign that puts your brand’s content in front of the right people.

You’ll want to set a brand awareness goal if you’re launching a new brand or product, if you’ve lost a significant amount of market share, or if you’re trying to reach a new target market.

Brand Awareness Metrics to Watch

Measuring brand awareness can get a little problematic because you need a focus group to measure brand recall. However, a few specific figures will give you a pretty good idea of how strong your brand presence is:

• Average reach per post
• Website traffic from social media
• Number of followers
• Number of brand mentions
• Engagement levels (likes, shares, comments, replies, etc.)
• Share of voice (brand coverage relative to your competitors)

For the most part, you’ll find these metrics via your corresponding social analytics tools (for instance, get Facebook metrics from Facebook Insights) or free tools like Google Analytics.

How to Increase Brand Awareness

After you identify the relevant metrics, it’s time to look at improving them. First, start posting content that excites your audience. Your brand is competing with a vast array of other brands for user attention so your content has to be uniquely valuable.

Aim to produce and share content that educates, informs, entertains or inspires. Try to mix things up a little with a balance of the four types of content and keep overtly promotional posts to a minimum.

You can develop content that increases brand awareness in several ways. When you inject some personality into your content, you remind everyone that you’re human, too. You might try influencer marketing but make sure you approach it the right way. Host a contest or giveaway if your audience loves free stuff.

To increase a post’s reach, try curating popular posts to leverage their virality and add relevant hashtags to each post. If you’ve got a decent marketing budget, you could invest in social media advertising to good effect. It’s pretty amazing how accurately you can target audiences with social media ads.

You’ve got a few options here, but keep the relevant metrics in mind. Those are the numbers you’re trying to improve.

#2: Drive Traffic/Leads

Website traffic and sales leads are the metrics associated with sales and revenue. By nature, social media platforms, with their labyrinth of hyperlinks and clickable media, make the process of growing sales and revenue pretty easy. However, driving traffic and leads requires a good understanding of what motivates users to click.

You could set a goal to drive traffic and leads if your sales are stagnant, if your website’s content isn’t getting much attention, or if you want to support your inbound marketing funnel.

Traffic and Lead Metrics to Track

When you’re aiming to increase traffic and leads, analytics should be your bread and butter. They’ll tell you exactly how well your social traffic and lead generation efforts are paying off. Here are the analytics you should be tracking:

• Traffic (page views) from social referrals
• Social referral session duration (bounce rate)
• Form submission from social referrals (email subscriptions, gated content signups, Contact Us forms)
• Social referral sales conversion rate

Although traffic, leads, and conversions matter, you should also look at actual revenue generated from your social media referrals. If your social conversions aren’t contributing as much revenue as your traditional conversions, your source might have an issue with traffic/lead quality.

How to Drive Traffic and Leads

To drive traffic, make your main strategy creating great content for your target audience. The more specific and relevant your content is to your target audience, the better your conversion rates from social referrals will be.

You can combine several strategies to increase traffic and leads. For starters, make sure your profile is consistent with your brand aesthetic so users’ expectations are met. Also, link to your site whenever it’s appropriate. Link back to your website in your bio, your branded posts, and anywhere else that allows you to insert a relevant call to action.

As you create content, promote your latest blog posts and content offers (ebooks, white papers, templates, etc.) on a regular basis to drive traffic to your branded assets. Repromote your best-performing content to further increase reach and exposure potential.

Advertising and influencers can also help promote your content. When you invest in social media advertising, make sure it’s highly targeted so you don’t waste money on irrelevant traffic. An influencer can share a link to your website with their audience and help you create content that both your followers and their followers will enjoy.

#3: Build a Community

However you look at it, your social media page combined with your followers and influencers make up an online community. Your job is to cultivate that community, growing it into a valuable tool that represents the image and vision of your organization.

Building a social media community is a good goal if you want to improve customer service efficiency, increase brand engagement, build trust, or provide more value to your audience.

Community-Building Metrics to Track

When you think about measuring the performance of your community-building efforts, keep in mind that it’s very difficult (if not impossible) to measure direct revenue generated from your community. With that said, community can help you gain valuable insights about who your customers are, what they like, and more.

Although you can’t directly measure revenue contribution, these metrics help you see whether your efforts are paying off:

• Engagement (number of clicks, likes, comments, shares)
• Brand mentions
• Posts linking to your content
• Follower growth rate
• Survey responses to “How did you come across our brand?” (if the response is social media)

In a nutshell, building a strong social media community is all about fostering engagement. The more relevant engagement within your community, the more valuable it becomes to users. You should also keep a close eye on which topics and content types (videos, memes, quotes, etc.) perform best and use that information to shape your community-building in the future.

How to Build a Community

Brand communities can provide businesses with a strong competitive advantage that’s extremely hard to replicate. Communities are virtually unrivaled when it comes to building trust with your audience. The simple act of owning/managing a highly engaged community is enough to establish a brand’s presence as an authority figure.

First and foremost, you should always encourage conversations and keep communication lines open. Make engaging with your brand as easy and compelling as possible. To do this, contribute to your community consistently. Valuable communities can require huge amounts of time and effort to develop, so before you get started be willing to commit to the work.

Share your passions with your community and let people know about your plans for the future. They’ll appreciate the transparency and you’ll increase your chances of positive engagement. To further encourage engagement, consider connecting your discussions to pop culture, current affairs, and (possibly) controversial topics. However, be careful not to come off as ignorant or offensive.

Giving your fans a voice can complement these efforts. Feature user posts that reflect your brand’s vision and let fans share their opinions. User-generated content is considered more trustworthy.  

Also, focus on customer service and problem-solving. Try to turn your community into a dynamic resource where professionals can find solutions to industry-related issues.

Finally, know that communities have very specific values, usually about trust and transparency. Make sure you understand those unwritten rules (like being dishonest or overly promotional) so you avoid breaking them and turning your community against you.

#4: Listen to Your Audience to Discover Their Interests

Social media presents brands with a massive opportunity to learn about their audience through social listening. The nature of social media means sharing information publicly, which is great for marketers doing research. By monitoring conversations, sentiments, and mentions, you can get a good idea of how your audience feels about a particular topic.

Social listening is a good social media goal when you want to promote a new product and there’s no existing market, or you want to focus on a specific niche. However, in reality, you should always use social listening. Constantly learning about your audience is something you just shouldn’t turn off.

Research and Development Metrics

Measuring how much you know about your audience can be difficult. No metrics directly correspond to social listening success. Lucky for you, a few figures have indirect relationships that still provide decent indicators:

• Brand mentions (this metric should increase while running social listening campaigns)
• Sentiment analysis (determines positive or negative social perceptions)
• Audience demographics (age, location, interests)
• Level of influence (authority of a social media user, measured by overall reach)

Some of these metrics are qualitative so they require more complex analysis to extract insights from the data. This analysis will probably require a larger time investment than your traditional data analysis processes, but remember that the ability to understand your audience is priceless.

How to Research Your Audience

Something as simple as looking up a particular hashtag and seeing the results can be considered social listening. But social listening can be a job in itself. To do social listening, keep track of conversations that mention your brand, and respond to as many interactions as possible to encourage brand-related conversations.

To streamline the work of social listening, use social listening tools like Mention or Hootsuite. Also, create brand notifications and keep them organized by campaign.

After you complete a listening campaign, put the information you gather into a report. Make sure your social listening report is actionable. For instance, if you discover a sentiment issue, the next step would be to focus on social media PR. It’s easy to get caught up with social media reports so maintain a healthy balance between actual listening and reporting. Always prioritize actual listening and acting on insights.

Conclusion

You need to properly define your social media goal before you know what strategies to adopt. A systematic process for goal setting can also help you track the right metrics and know how successful your efforts are in achieving your specific goal.

Although you’re not restricted to one goal, the metrics are different for each goal, so you’ll have to cover more bases. If you’re just starting out with social media marketing, start with one or two goals at most.

What do you think? Do you know what your next social media goal is? What tips or tactics from this article will you use? Please share your thoughts below.

Source: Social Media Examiner