Social Media marketing is easily one of the most important resources of today’s business’ and industries. But you may be asking yourself, is it really that necessary for companies to invest in. In short, the answer is yes, absolutely. Put simply, businesses, companies, and industries cannot experience maximum growth without attempting to maximize social media marketing, […]
People often ask why brands or businesses spend a significant amount of time looking over the analytics and reportings they receive from their digital and social media marketing campaigns. Individuals assume they are there to show how many likes, views, and interactions your business gets on social media platforms. While that is true, reporting and analytics can show much more information that a brand, business, company, or their digital marketing agency could use to grow.
Knowing Your Target Audience
Reports and analytics are one of the most beneficial ways a business, social media marketing agency, or digital marketing agency can learn about who their service or good is attracting. Using tools like Google Analytics and AdWords can tell you statistics ranging from how many people viewed your page, to what city it was viewed from. It can even suggest what mobile operating system was used to view it. Knowing even the smallest of details such as age, gender, and what language viewers communicate in can strengthen a 
business. It can do so by giving ideas on how to continue to attract the current audience of the brand or service as well as how to attract new clients. Knowing all about the target audience ultimately provides more information on how a company or its marketing team can customize posts, messages, advertisements, emails, etc. to continue to attract their certain audience.
Knowing the Best Times to Interact on Social Media
Digital marketing reports and analytics can provide copious amounts of information on when, what time, and how many people are interacting with your social and digital media platforms. These reports and analytics make it easier for a business or their agency to know when the best social media interaction times for them are. Using Sprout Social, for example, will show exactly how many engagements your posts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) or advertisements gets. By using the information given you may or may not be able to see a pattern develop that shows your business when the best interaction times are based on previous posts and engagements. It’s not always about how many likes or views the post gets, but about what information you can get out of it.
Knowing How to Interact on Social Media
Knowing how to interact with social media is equally as important as knowing the best interaction times. One could post something at a prime posting time and still not get as many likes as possible of because of the content. Although reports and analytics do not specifically show how to maximize your use of social media, looking deeper into these reports can give you a sense of what works for your company and what does not. Locations, hashtags, captions, and tags are just a few things that can help take a company’s engagements, and posts, to the next level. Utilizing what your audience likes to see can help attract customers to your product, page, and business. Having an aesthetically pleasing profile, pictures, website, Instagram, Facebook, etc. also adds to the number of views and engagements a company’s social media platforms can get. The little things in social media, quite honestly, matter almost as much as the big things.
Networking
One important way that reporting and analytics can improve a company’s platform is through networking or getting its name out there. People, brands, and businesses ultimately use social media platforms to connect with others. Businesses use these platforms to connect with clients, whether they be current or future, and other businesses/people that are in the same or very similar fields. This gives businesses a chance to collaborate, gain new customers from their followers, get new ideas, and learn from the mistakes of others. Posting content, keeping everything up-to-date, and being active online through social media, email advertisements, and pop-up advertisements could also improve a business’ search engine ranking. The better the SER, the more page visits a website could potentially get since their page will be closer to the top when their content is searched.
Ultimately, reporting and analytics are there to provide a business or their digital and social media marketing agencies with the tools necessary for their success. They were made as the stepping stones for a business’ social and digital media campaigns improvement. Today, social media is a necessity for any business, brand, or person to get their word out. It’s a huge part of our daily lives and can be a powerful factor in whether a business will be mediocre or taken to the next level.
Being able to interact with clients, customers, and consumers are essential to the livelihood of a growing business. Bright Age is a digital marketing agency that understands that social media is more than just a space to post. It needs to be interactive. Through the implementation of an interactive social media strategy; engagement and traffic can be significantly maximized, on your business’ social media platforms. Utilizing social media’s interconnectivity, effectively, you can alert new customers to your services, completely organically. Read on to learn about seven ways to maximize the use of technology and social media for your brand.
Geotags
Geotags are a fantastic way to engage with customers while promoting your brand in the process. A creative and strategic company for social media will utilize geotags on Snapchat to illustrate where the user is currently. This can be done with an illustration, or simply the name of the location. When customers come to your location, they can share photos with their contacts, easily highlighting your brand. Snapchat is a unique media outlet because of its fleeting nature (posted images are only available for 24 hours). Therefore, it is essential to make an impact when it is used in the context of your brand. Your geotag should be bold and be representative of your service. Customers can essentially promote your business for you, and create organic advertising, through the implementation of geotags.
Aesthetics
Details, such as a consistent color scheme, can enhance your social media presence quickly and effectively. Individuals are more likely to engage with your content if it looks presentable. Therefore, having good quality images as well as aesthetically pleasing themes can increase your brand’s following immensely. A potential consumer is more inclined to engage with your brand if it looks reliable, professional, and strategized. Bright Age is a company for social media that practices what we preach. Our social media accounts are maintained to be clean, accessible, and modern. Having an aesthetically pleasing social media presence enhances the chance that individuals will like and share your content. This will spread your brand in a positive, not to mention free, way.
Unique Hashtags
Being able to find individuals interacting with your brand is essential to the success of your social media strategy. One solution to this is through the use of unique hashtags. Hashtags allow your brand to be easily organized and found by potential customers. Specifically, brand-specific hashtags can organize your media for customers to view, as well as allow you to see how individuals are posting about you. This is specifically very effective on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. By encouraging individuals to use brand specific hashtags when interacting with your business, you can more effectively create connections with those supporting you.
Engage Followers
Interacting with individuals that support your brand is a simple way to maximize your use of social media. This makes the customer feel valued and can create a sense of loyalty. This is essentially an extension of customer service. Just because the interaction is over social media does not make it any less impactful or important.
Location
Tagging your location can create another access to individuals supporting your brand. By clicking on the location tab, an individual can see where your services are located and who has posted there. This is yet another tool that you can use to engage with customers and see how they are interacting with your brand. It is fantastic when costumers tag your location because it gives their followers a direct link to where you are and will highlight what other individuals have been doing there.
Acknowledge Customers
Crowdsourcing content is completely acceptable. Showcasing what consumers have posted on your social media accounts is a terrific way to engage with them and showcase your brand in a new light. It continually makes your brand appear reliable by highlighting customers that love the service you are providing. It is a small way of thanking individuals for taking the time to acknowledge your brand and increase the interconnectivity of your social network.
Play to Your Audience
Your social media traffic can easily be maximized by tailoring it to the specific demographic your brand is geared towards. By being aware of the individuals that actively use your service, your social media can better promote your brand using techniques, such as the ones listed above. This will maximize your follower count and engagement.
Technology and social media are essential to the prosperity and survival of a growing business. It is a way to connect to individuals and effectively alert potential customers of your services. A digital marketing agency can assist in growing your presence and generate acknowledgment of your brand. By implementing these seven techniques, you can organically grow and maintain a successful social media presence.
Businesses can execute their social media advertising campaigns more efficiently when they create and target custom audiences. Social media platforms offer your business various features to build a custom target audience that is a result of your specific filters and preferences.
Facebook and Instagram Custom Audience:
Facebook and Instagram offer custom audience features that use a combination of user profile information and your business’ customer base information to locate and reach your desired target audience. Your business can create a Customer File Custom Audience by simply uploading its customer database information onto Facebook, such as email, phone number, address, first and last name, purchase history, etc. Your company’s social media advertising campaign can also target users based on Video Engagement. With this option, your company can distinguish its target audience based on how long a user watched a specific video your company posted, or how much of the video they watched overall. Your business can create a target audience based on Website Traffic. This feature allows you to create a custom audience based on how frequently the users visit your website, whether a purchase was made, and how recently they visited the website. Facebook also offers your company a Remarketing feature. With this feature, your company can choose to remarket a campaign that targets a specific type of customer. This target audience can be chosen from recent website visitors, company email lists, other customer data, and platform data from those who have interacted with your social media pages.
Google AdWords Target Custom Ad Groups: Google AdWords offers businesses the option for custom audience targeting with ad groups. Your business can use social media advertising to reach people based on their interest in products or services like yours. Target audiences created with this feature are a called Custom Affinity Audiences, which are mostly used by companies going from TV to online marketing. These custom ads are based on specific interests from a wide range of categories within a user’s search and browse history on all Google Platforms and YouTube. Your company’s Custom Affinity Audience can be based on keywords regarding specific interests that apply to your product or service, URLs from your company or competition’s website content, the types of places users are interested in, and different apps that users are interested in or using. Google also has Custom Ad Groups that allow your business to reach its target audience based on life events, how actively users are searching in your market, and customer intent, such as how much research a user is doing your company on sites and apps.
Twitter Custom Audience Demographics: Twitter offers businesses a variety of filters to reach their target audience that focus less on user profile data, and more on conversations happening within the network, user handles, and keywords. Your business can select the demographics, countries, languages, genders, and more of their target audience for each post. Twitter also allows your business to target specific users who recently visited your website, who left your website without making a purchase, and who downloaded your app but have not engaged with it recently. If your company wants to target an audience who uses specific technology, Twitter has a feature for that as well. Your business can choose to specifically target users that are accessing the site via iOS devices, Android devices, Blackberry devices, laptops and desktop computers, mobile devices, and new devices. Your business can also assign keywords to reach their target audience that are broad, specific phrases, and negative matches. In assigning keywords, your company can customize the target audience by regulating which searches it will appear in.
LinkedIn Matched Audience: LinkedIn’s custom audience strategy also focuses more on user handles, keywords, and conversations happening within its network, and less on profile data. Last year, LinkedIn added a new custom audience feature which made it more competitive with the social media advertising features already available on other social media platforms. LinkedIn’s “Matched Audiences” feature enabled business profiles to target users through matching their business and personal email addresses. This feature offered Business-To-Business advertisers an extremely advanced email match strategy that enables them to narrow in on a more specific email targeting list. This feature requires the finalized list length to be a minimum of 300 matched emails, so your business may have to upload over 500 emails to produce the minimum requirement of 300 matches. Although the list may take up to 48 hours to generate, it is extremely useful for a business’ social media advertising strategy.
It’s no secret that social media plays an essential part in any brand or business. Online communities exist for almost every imaginable industry, and often, members of these communities will consult a business’ social media page as a deciding factor before completing a purchase.
For companies that actively regulate and use their social media, more opportunities will present itself to connect and interact with customers (and potential customers) at a more personable and effective level. Managing these communities on social media can be crucial to the long-term success of your business, and with the rise of mobile applications like Yelp, Facebook, and Instagram; the ability to see and respond to customer concerns is made increasingly available. It’s no surprise that, according to Sprout Social, the top choice for receiving customer care is now through social media.
Managing these pockets of communities, however, can be time-consuming and a full-time job. For this, you can consult a company for community management who can best provide you with the help you need. As this role becomes readily intertwined into the daily routine of your business or brand, the following benefits of community management will come to fruition.
Brand Presence
Community managers work as your brand advocates, introducing your product/service into new corners of the umbrella industry. So, as you become more active online through community management, your brand presence will also improve. A company for community management achieves this by regularly following up with your social contacts and maintaining those relationships, but also focusing on acquiring new relationships by reaching out to new networks and community niches. Doing so increases the number of potential customers for your business, as your brand presence and reach spreads out further into different social bubbles. Regular interaction from a community manager with existing social contacts and potential customers may even earn you the backing of social media influencers as earned media. With a growing brand presence, you may also see increases in a level of engagement from your consumers.
Better Reputation
As your brand presence grows and engagement increases, keep in mind that it’s only becoming easier to access and see discontent with and complaints about a brand’s service/product through social media as customers turn to applications like Yelp to rate their experience. By being immediately reactive to strong opinions, positive or negative, a company for community management will build a better reputation for your brand as well as see a closer relationship to your customers while you grow within their communities. If your business or brand is consistently interacting with your communities by answering complaints or reaching out to influencers, you’re simultaneously fortifying your relationships with your customers and building brand loyalty. In investing in community management, brands develop a trustworthy and customer-oriented image.
Receive Feedback
As consumers engage more with your community manager, a company for community management will be able to give your business feedback on how your brand is perceived in the minds of the consumers. Community management also can moderate the success of a brand’s digital presence based off the feedback received. By understanding customer complaints and compliments, your business can make more strategical moves.
Rise in Sales and Web Traffic
The end goal to community management for most is to increase web traffic and see a rise in sales. As community management discover new niches to target, push brand presence farther, and receive feedback on the success of your online profiles, a business can actively adapt to consumer trends and see a rise in sales and website traffic.
Without community management, your business risks losing a customer to a competitor or cultivating bad PR due to lack of communication. Sprout Social states that expected response time over social media is from 0-4 hours, but in reality, response time can take up to 10 hours. With community management, however, your business can be proactive when dealing with your consumers digitally, learning more about the fabric of your business’ industry, learning how to attract new customers, and building a loyal relationship with your current customers.
To remain relevant to online communities, your social media marketing efforts must actively adapt and respond to social media updates. Social media is a constantly changing playing field, where new platforms seem to emerge every day, while familiar platforms like Facebook or Snapchat grow and improve. Here are seven updates to be aware of when helping your business or brand stay on top of social media marketing efforts.
Augmented Reality (AR)
We see technology opening new doors left and right, and augmented reality is one such up and coming trend for social media marketers to take advantage of. For instance, AR has equipped Snapchat with the technology to release Shoppable AR. This new feature offers advertisers the opportunity to sell their products through sponsored lenses at a more advanced level. A lens-based advertising, Shoppable AR allows Snapchat users to download, buy, or view a video directly from a Snapchat face filter on the in-app browser.
Taking Shoppable AR a step further, Snapchat will also roll out with AR menus. By scanning a Snapcode, customers will be able to use this AR menu feature to see a virtual copy of their meal before even ordering it. Bareburger is one of the first clever restaurants to implement the use of Snapchat’s AR menu, to connect with the “foodie” community that often uses social media as a platform to share pictures of their meals.
Snapchat isn’t the only social media platform to test the waters with AR features, however, as Facebook Stories also offers an AR drawing tool to its users.
Augmented Reality is a groundbreaking technology predicted to play a significant part in the changes social media marketing will have to embrace in this year, as well as the years to come.
Improving User Experience
Another major update within the social media community is the new initiative to improve user experience across multiple platforms. As this new goal becomes more of a priority to social media, social media marketing will become directly affected. This is seen most prominently with Facebook’s recent algorithm changes, as Facebook now reduces the reach of posts by publishers and brands to emphasize and focus more on content generated by friends and family. With this shift, many companies now worry how this will affect their online viewership, specifically with their Facebook pages that already see a decrease in reach.
Twitter also seeks to improve the user experience by cracking down on bots and strictly limiting how users can automate tweets from multiple accounts at once. By doing so, Twitter’s hope is to add some transparency and truth in an online world riddled with spam and political propaganda bots that cultivate distrust amongst the Twitter community. Matching Facebook’s new initiative, Twitter will also limit the amount of news shown to its users compared to their real-life connections.
Instagram is improving user experience by aiding users in copyright issues through the transition of Rights Manager from Facebook to Instagram, which will aid users in protecting their content.
Facebook Updates
Although Facebook’s algorithm changes have reduced the reach of company pages, Facebook has released QR codes as an easier way to connect users to specific accounts. Page managers can tailor a code to automatically like the page, check-in, or connect the user to a recommendation or review page.
Facebook is also releasing Facebook Video Premiere, as an expansion of the extremely successful live streaming feature. Video Premiere will boost engagement by allowing users to post pre-recorded content in the context of Facebook Live. Premiere will work similarly to Live Streaming and seek to achieve similar engagement rates; the only difference in that the videos are pre-recorded. Facebook Live Streaming generates six times more interactions than regular video posts, and with Facebook Video Premiere, the hope is that this interaction level will stay on the rise.
Instagram Updates
A recent update to the Instagram user interface is the “recommended posts” intertwined with the natural flow of your feed. This recommended feature represents a great opportunity for social media marketing. Following hashtags, and thus the community that uses the hashtag is also a new feature Instagram offers.
Instagram has also announced plans to include Carousel Ads as a new ad format in Instagram Stories. Rather than a single photo or video, a brand advertising through Instagram stories can include up to three! With new ad formats released by Instagram, there is now more variety in social media marketing on the Instagram platform to connect with your brand’s niche communities. According to Statista, the monthly active users of Instagram Stories each month impressively overtakes the monthly active users of Snapchat.
Twitter Updates
The most recent Twitter updates are the expanded character count for tweets and threaded posts. Twitter also began highlighting content as well, such as sports games. Earlier this year rumors also unfolded about Twitter becoming more video-friendly like Snapchat. Though this is still unconfirmed, it is possible that with a new feature centered around videos, Twitter will also allow advertisers to promote and create sponsored content in a new way.
The newest development, however, is Twitter’s reported rise in profitability and gain in users once more. With this sudden and recent growth, Twitter is in a position of scrutiny by the public, which may result in possible continued social media updates.
Snapchat Updates
Snapchat’s most relevant and recent update is their new user interface. This brought a lot of discontent from the users, even bringing about a petition to return the previous design of Snapchat back into the spotlight. The main difference, which many argued to be hard to navigate, is the separation of content of friends, to celebrities and promoted material. It is still unknown whether Snapchat will bring back their old design, keep the new design, or implement a hybrid.
Up and Coming Social Media Platforms
Amino Apps targets a younger Generation Z audience looking to share in the community. The average user range for Amino Apps is 14-24, which is a more focused age range compared to that of Tumblr or Instagram. Known as a cross between Tumblr and Reddit, Amino Apps creates communities for a variety of interests ranging from Pokémon to anime to K-pop. Amino Apps is most recently introducing Avatar Chat, where users can chat using animated avatars.
A second up and coming social media platform is Vero True Social. Vero True Social’s mission is to provide an honest platform, free from advertising and data mining. Although brands can still own a profile and use User Generated Content or Influencer Marketing, brands cannot pay for advertising on the Vero interface. Products can be sold, although Vero will collect a commission. Vero has gained a significant amount of traction recently, however, it is still unclear whether it will become as widespread as Instagram or Snapchat. Is what Vero offers, a social experience free of advertisements, worth its price?
These seven updates have already brought about significant change to the social media world, affecting the tactics with which we can implement social media marketing. By ensuring that your brand keeps track of these social media updates even beyond just these seven, you can stay ahead of the game or even predict what the next big move is in the social media marketing industry.
Instagram now has more than 400 million active users and is a main connection to the younger generation, forcing businesses to get online and implement an Instagram marketing strategy to stay relevant. Many businesses are new to Instagram and social media advertising in general, so they may struggle with implementing an Instagram marketing strategy. Below are some tips on how to use Instagram marketing for businesses/companies.
Build Content Themes
Although it is important to maintain a consistent tone and voice in your captions, how your company presents itself visually on Instagram is an extremely important factor. When a potential customer clicks on your Instagram profile, the first thing they will see is a grid of your 9 most recent photos. These viewers will form an opinion on a company based on how visually appealing and cohesive the profile is. Planning your company’s posts ahead of time ensures that there is variety in the style of photos while still correlating to the overall theme of the account. Preview is a free app that any Instagram user can download to plan the layout of their posts before they are shared.
Create And Use Branded Hashtags
Branded hashtags build consumer awareness and interactions on Instagram posts and businesses that implement branded hashtags to their Instagram marketing strategy stand out over those that do not. 
Pottery Barn began a social media campaign in which they use #mypotterybarn in their captions and occasionally reposts high-quality customer posts that use the hashtag. This builds brand awareness and engagements online. Hashtags can now be followed on Instagram, so a catchy branded hashtag that users follow will bring greater following and brand awareness. Sprout Social has tools to measure your branded hashtag’s success against benchmark hashtags so your company can see how much the branded hashtag increased post engagements over time.
Use Geolocation Tags
Instagram offers users the ability to search for posts at specific locations. This is a great tool for business to utilize in Instagram advertising because your posts will show up in any location search that is near the geotag being used. Using a geolocation tag on your company’s posts, whether it is a picture, video, or post to your story, will boost the interaction and engagement dramatically. SproutSocial recognized that posts with a geotag get 79% more engagements than those without a geotag. Using a geotag will also enhance your Instagram marketing strategy because it enables you to monitor and track who is engaging in different specific locations. If your business consistently tags its commercial geolocation in posts, customers will likely begin to tag themselves at your business locations as well.
Use Call-To-Action Buttons
Instagram now offers users the option to access a company’s product simply by tapping their fingers. The new “shop now” and “install now” features on business posts direct users to any destination, on or off Instagram, that a company chooses for the link to go. Theses call-to-action buttons will be a great tool for your company if you sell product or services online. This new linking feature will help drive website traffic, sales, downloads, and do more that aligns with your Instagram marketing strategy.
Invest In Instagram Ads
Promoting posts on Instagram has brought positive results to advertisers from all industries. Making an investment in Instagram advertising is an important tactic for your business’ promotional strategy because the ads increase traffic to the company website, brand awareness, online sales, and application downloads. Instagram gives businesses the option to promote their content each time they post it. In making an ad/promotion, your company can specify the objective of the ad, select the target audience, and set up the budget preferences. Instagram allows your business to set up its own specific budget that tailors to your preferences: you can choose a daily limit for your ad budget, or larger, lifetime limit that is used in increments. After your business sets up the ad, it can optimize the delivery (will it be on the feed or shown in between Instagram stories), set the name of the ad that will be displayed, and, lastly, you can format the media that will be posted (video, photo, or carousel of photos).
Schedule Your Ad Campaigns
Your business will recognize that posts shared at specific times of the day on Instagram tend to result in more engagements than other times of the day. Instead of worrying about being on the computer at that specific time to share your posts every day to ensure optimal engagements, websites like Hootsuite allow businesses to easily plan, optimize, schedule, and share ads from one location. Hootsuite allows businesses to manage and schedule their Instagram and Facebook ads, along with offering the options to preview and measure the success of ads using built-in analytics. Previewing and scheduling posts should be a key part of your Instagram marketing strategy because it will enhance your business’ online presence, consistency, and brand recognition.
Creating and implementing social media strategy is important – but not all strategies are created equal. Every business is unique, so digital marketing agencies approach each social media strategy differently depending on the client’s specific industry or business. By analyzing how a company operates, what its goals are, and who its competitors are within the industry, a digital marketing agency can fine-tune and customize your social media strategy to better achieve company objectives. Through this careful evaluation, you can work towards increasing your business’ social media ROI (return on investment).
In the B2C world, mass marketing through social media is a great way to grab the attention of potential consumers. In a B2B setting, social media is a channel through which relationships are built and sustained. The following are some industry specific examples that demonstrate success in how businesses approached their social media strategy.
Retail
In the retail industry, the conversion of viewer to consumer is of primary importance. In developing a community through social media, businesses within the retail industry can target consumers to engage and buy into their product.
Demographics show that GoPro consumers are physically active, adventurous, and avid social media users. By implementing a UGC social media strategy (user generated content), GoPro has been extremely successful in increasing engagement and loyalty within their community. By offering a chance for product users to be featured on their social media pages, not only are GoPro consumers sharing actively through social media channels like Instagram and Facebook, but simultaneously marketing different product lines to potential customers. Other retail businesses like restaurant chains can similarly implement social media as a channel for UGC and word of mouth to reach their engagement and conversion goals.
Influencers are becoming an increasingly common social media strategy. The relationship between social media and social media influencers has always played an active part in aiding retail businesses in selling any sort of product – whether that be a juice cleansing diet, an article of clothing, or a brand of makeup. Influencers are paid generously, and with a well-placed post on social media, influencers can offer retail businesses a targeted reach within a niche community. An impactful and recent example that demonstrates the importance of an influencer to a brand’s social media strategy is the relationship between Kylie Jenner and Snapchat. Known as the queen of Snapchat, Kylie Jenner has been one of the greatest influencers that brought Snapchat into the mainstream world that younger generations live in. But with one single tweet about how she no longer uses Snapchat – the business took a $1 billion drop in market value.
Celebrities and influencers also use social media as a way to market themselves. As well-known public figures, celebrities create a world of personal connection to their fan community through social media. Just as Kylie Jenner is an influencer for other brands, she and the whole Kardashian family also market themselves and their own products through social media.
Entertainment
The entertainment industry is naturally one of the largest players when it comes to social media. Also focused on increased revenue goals, the entertainment industry often uses social media to create content to resonate with its community and keep them engaged.
Netflix whose user demographics include younger generations with an interest in culture and trendsetting, is one such example of an entertainment business that uses social media to reach their community. To market their products and strengthen relationships, Netflix will post relatable and famous quotes from movies or shows they currently offer, relevant gifs, or current entertainment industry news. Upcoming or recently released movies will implement similar strategies in order to increase the engagement and reach of the movie to a wider audience who may be interested in seeing the motion picture in theaters. Through social media, entertainment products can fully showcase their brand and personality to their viewers, implementing a social media strategy that expands their reach and better connects them to relevant communities.
Science & Technology
Technology is always changing and with social media, consumers can stay on top of technology trends, while tech companies can quickly and effectively reach out to the tech centered community.
NASA is one of many technology focused businesses that caters to its consumers who are always looking out for industry related news. By sharing eye-catching imagery and newsworthy stories, NASA has amassed a great following on their social pages from technology obsessed aficionados.
General Electric similarly caters to their average consumer’s interest in science and engineering by releasing relevant visual and written content that spans across topics like new research, educational information, and stories.
Marketing
And of course, B2B marketing professionals like digital creative agencies use social media as a way to increase the opportunity to build relationships and attract new contacts.
Though we can reference the success of other businesses, every client experiences their social media strategy in unique ways. Your digital marketing agency is always dedicated to adapting and adjusting strategy based off of your success. Social media strategy will never be stationary for long.
The first step to starting a social media campaign for your brand, is to define your business goals that will help in developing your strategy. Commonly used goals within a social media campaign are increases in engagement, increases in brand awareness, or increases in customers. But how do we measure if these goals have been achieved? A carefully developed set of KPI’s will aid in giving you the answers you seek.
KPI’s, or Key Performance Indicators, are tools that can help measure your success in achieving your social media objectives. By optimizing and regularly monitoring these KPI’s, you can set your brand on the right path in further reaching your goals. Here are some KPI ideas to help start you off on measuring the performance of your brand’s social media strategy.
Impressions
Using impressions as a KPI defines the success of your strategy’s reach by quantifying how many people have seen your social media content. Though a singular person can generate multiple impressions, for example, on a Facebook post, higher numbers of impressions over time generally implies that viewers are being exposed to, and are more likely to trust and interact with your brand later on.
Engagement/Reactions
Engagement on your social media is driven over time by the number of clicks, likes, tags, positive comments, retweets, or shares on your social media pages. Using engagements as a KPI focuses on measuring your brand’s noticeability. For instance, a repost or tag on Instagram indicates that your viewer is interacting not only with your brand but with their own community as well. In other words, how much do your viewers like your branded content? The more your viewers react and engage, the more likely they are to notice and remember your brand in the future.
Click-through Rates/ Website Traffic
Engagement, however, must translate into an actionable decision on your viewer’s part to buy into your brand. A KPI to help measure the success of this transfer is by click-through-rate and/or website traffic.
A click is an actionable move made by your viewer, and a click-through rate deciphers whether or not if you’ve successfully redirected your viewers from social media campaign to website page. Once there, they can have the opportunity to purchase your product or service. This KPI demonstrates how your social media strategy has possibly generated more customers for your brand. If social media engagement is high, but website traffic shows little improvement, then this might be a sign to improve your content or call to action.
Sales Revenue
As a business, one of your objectives is most likely to increase your sales revenue. As a KPI, sales revenue determines success by looking at the conversion rate of how many of your customers found your brand through social media.
Customer Service
Because social media is one of the easiest ways to interact and connect with your consumers, it also becomes a channel through which your brand can provide superb customer service. Using this as a KPI, you can track the number of issues your brand has resolved through social media and can see how well your company is doing through the eyes of your consumers.
Share of Voice
Share of Voice is reflective of how much of a leader your brand is within its industry. As a KPI, share of voice asks how you to analyze how much buzz you are generating compared to your competitors. Measuring this can be done through tracking the messages being shared about your brand, filtered by a specific keyword or hashtag, and then comparing it to those of your competitors. If share of voice is low, looking at your competitor’s campaigns and seeing what they’re implementing may help you decide on the next steps to improve your own social media strategy.
Social media has enabled companies to understand the behaviors and preferences of their target market on a deeper level than ever before. In gaining this better understanding of their target market, companies can tailor their brand’s marketing approach to appeal to their preferred audience. Although social media marketing is widely utilized, companies struggle with trying to measure the success of their brand’s social media program. Below are six ways that our social media agency specifically measures the success of a brand’s social media program.
1: Set and Use Goal-driven Metrics:
It is essential that you set clear and specific goals to guide your social media branding campaign. These specific goals will clarify what metrics your social media program should be monitoring and measuring. If your goal is to increase engagements on Facebook, your company can set a specific goal for engagements over the next month, make the necessary adjustments to the Facebook posts, and analyze the frequency of engagements in comparison to the frequency of engagements prior to the new campaign on social media monitoring programs, such as Sprout Social. Setting and monitoring your brand’s goal-driven metrics is the best way analyze how your brand’s social media program is performing at any given time.
2: Measure and Analyze Engagement Rates
There are a multitude of ways to measure engagements on your brand’s social media program instead of merely looking to see if your posts got more likes this month than in the last couple of months. In using Sprout, and other community management programs, social media agencies are skilled with measuring your brand’s engagement rate on posts by analyzing questions such as: Out of the total number of impressions, how many of those people are engaging with your posts? How many are clicking to view the post? And, how many are scrolling right past it? When answered, these questions can bring insight on what adjustments need to be made to your social media program.
3: Analyze Your Rate of Response to Customers
A crucial part of maintaining your social media branding and image is interacting with consumers on various social media platforms. Although this task may seem tedious, social media agencies recognize the importance of monitoring and responding to the online community; and make it a priority. Your social media program should evaluate their rate of response to customers on social media within a certain period (24 hours) and take note. If your company does not monitor and reply to the online community in a timely manner, they may be damaging the brand’s image.
4: Use a Tool to Measure Your Paid vs Organic Likes
Business profiles are always offered the option to “boost” of “promote” their post for a fee. Boosting your posts may make it visible to more of your target market, but do you measure how many of the likes you get are organic as opposed to a result of your boost? Do you have a tool to distinguish your unpaid likes from paid likes on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.? Are you seeing more traffic from one over the other? The answers to these questions are critical for your social media branding program’s success. Social media agencies analyze and evaluate these questions constantly to construct a brand’s campaign toward what is working and away from what is not.
5: Conversion Rate from Visitor to Buyer
Your brand’s social media program will have many different goals. If your company’s goal is to increase sales, measuring the conversion rate from visitor to buyer is a necessity. Simply measuring the percentage of visitors on your page that end up making a purchase will give you great insight on how well your campaign is working. This conversion ratio can be used as a benchmark for future campaigns to see how your brand’s new camping strategy is working in comparison to the one used in the previous months, or even years. This is simple ratio is commonly overlooked by companies but is essential for analyzing sales goals.
6: Verify the Leading Indicators of Outcomes
Typically, companies see that specific engagements (likes, shares, comments, etc.) are very reliable indicators for how their social media strategy is performing and for predicting upcoming sales. There are different tools that a social media agency can use to analyze what type of posts bring the most engagements and, therefore, tailor your social media branding to the consumer’s tastes. The frequency of these specific engagements presents a substantial indication of how consumers will react to your brand. This recognition will also be useful when your company is looking to make sales predictions.
