Social Media is critical to your organization’s success, especially going forward as more and more customer connections and engagement are moving there. With millions and millions of people spending more and more time on social sites, it only makes good business sense to be there with them. Just like any business decision, this should be thought out and not jumped into haphazardly. Here are 5 steps for successful social media monitoring with Send Social Media:
Know Your Plan
It is always important to know why and what you are going to do before you do it, otherwise you are being blown by the wind. Identifying which social networks best serve your interests and where your best chances are to make an impact on the public is a first step. Twitter and Facebook are givens, but you may find that SoundCloud is a great fit for you, or Pinterest. The more sites you can use effectively the better, but if you get no engagement from the site, move on. You also need to know what you want to accomplish there. Remember that throwing out links and ads left and right is not good social etiquette, you have to be real and engage.
Listen More, Talk Less
You must seek out your audience by monitoring sites for key words and phrases that relate to your mission. If they are mentioning your name, even better. If you are a company that sells patio grills and accessories, you might search sites for mentions of cooking, grilling, recipes, barbecues, or similar things. Once you find people talking about subjects that relate to what you do, you can follow or friend them and start engaging. Once you do engage, promote yourself, but don’t cram it down their throat. Just be friendly with them, and throw in what you can when it comes up.
Recruit Promoters
Once you are engaged, get your new friends to work for you by issuing campaign challenges, asking questions that people can answer and want to answer (these don’t have to be about your business), etc. You can then turn the conversation to something related to your business and attempt to get feedback. This builds the bond. The more you can create a give and take instead of just a give, the better the chance you can get your people to “like” you, retweet you, and generally become brand evangelists for you.
Social means Social
Again, don’t send out links about your latest promotion every hour. A social media site is exactly that, a place for conversations and casual engagement. If you try to convert your Facebook page to your sales floor, you will lose people quickly. There must be a great deal of tact employed with your engagement, finding the right balance between promotion and conversation. Try to think of it as hanging out with your friend and trying to get them to do something for you. You have to spend a lot more time buttering them up than throwing your sales pitch at them. If the relationship is built right, th rest comes easily.
Measure Success
There are simply too many people you will be exposed to to be able to track them by memory or with ticks on a page with a pencil. You will need a solid piece of social media management software to do the job right. The right dashboard gives you the numbers and analytics you need to effectively track how your engagement is increasing traffic and promoters. After all, it’s all about your ROI, and if you aren’t tracking that, then why are you doing it in the first place?
One of our most popular new features on Send Social Media, is the ability to resell and offer your own version of our social media marketing platform to your clients.
With our white label social media tool, you have the option to manage social media on behalf of your clients, or train them up and allow them to log in themselves and manage their own social media accounts. Send Social Media is a great tool to help implement a social media strategy for your customers. Why Send Social Media is the perfect Social Media Management Tool for Agencies:
The way the white label site works is as follows:
For more information be sure to contact us
So your company is on Facebook and Twitter and you are sending out posts and Tweets like there is no tomorrow. What are you getting for the effort? Do you know? If you don’t know, then you are burning productivity like my first car burned oil. Measuring social media ROI is just as important as any other area of your business. Some business owners are still unsure as to what they are measuring, however. That’s why we here at Send Social Media are giving you the gift of information with this post. Here are 10 Social Media ROI Metrics your Company Should Monitor:
Leads
You should be tracking click-throughs to your site from social media sites, as well as your “likes”, follows, etc. Also try to be aware of and track any referrals that are sent your way from your existing social media contacts.
Engagement Duration
How much time are your “friends” spending on your Facebook page or using your Facebook app? (you do have one don’t you?) This “stickiness” factor should be improving over time, not staying stagnant or declining.
Bounce Rate
When folks click through from a social media site to your website, are they leaving again right away or do they hang out and see what you have going on there? If they aren’t spending time on your site once they get there, you need to evaluate whether or not your site has relevant, fresh content. The social sites can help get people to your site, but it needs to be a fun or interesting place to be, or they will get out of there like they just walked into the wrong restroom.
Network and Membership Size
For this you want to count the people that actively engage. There are lots of people who will like, follow, friend, or whatever your social presence and then they never mess with it again. You want to know how many are actually reading your posts, commenting, sharing, etc. This number should be growing, as well as the number of new people joining the fun.
Activity Ratio
This is very similar to the previous metric, but it is about the ratio of active to inactive network members instead of just the growth numbers. This ratio should also ideally tilt more and more into the active side as you go along to consider your activity a success.
Conversions
This is big. Business wise this is the most important metric here. You ultimately want to convert your network members into sales, subscriptions, or anything else that can be monetized in one way or another. You are a business, right? Track this very closely and then work on increasing the other metrics with the goal of pushing them into this one.
Mentions
Tracking your mentions on different social sites is one of the best ways to see how pervasive your brand is on the scene. This includes the good and the bad mentions. The good will tell you what you are doing right and how well you are doing it. The bad mentions tell you where you need to improve.
Loyalty
Hand in hand with other metrics, it is important to track how many times your content and links are being shared, if you are getting evangelized by your promoters, and how often they do these things.
The Viral Factor
Extended networks also need to be monitored. In other words, when one of your network members shares a link or post from you to one of their friends that is not on your network, are they resharing it with their friends, and so on. The further you can reach, the better.
Blog Comments
You need a blog. It keeps the web-crawling robots tracking your site and keeps you in thee search results. You also need to have a comments section after each post. You need to reply to comments. Then you need to track these comments, shares of the blog posts, etc. You also need to make sure that you have buttons by the posts that people can click on to share them on the social sites.
Tracking your social media engagement is just as important as actually being on the social sites. Don’t waste time on the sites if you aren’t going to measure the results. Of course, choosing to abstain from Facebook, Twitter, and the others is as good as hanging out the “closed ” sign for good.
One of the most common questions businesses have about social media is how they can produce interesting content that’s relevant to what they do and the audience they want to reach. While everyone knows that things like cat pictures perform really well on social media, that’s not content that’s going to be compatible with most businesses. However, that doesn’t mean that businesses won’t be able to produce great social media content. Regardless of the specific industry, there are always ways to come up with content that’s useful and interesting.
To help you get started, let’s take a look at some different ways your business can create social media content that will be well-received:
Use Blogging as the Foundation
If your business is in the early stages of social media marketing, the best place to begin producing content is your blog. The reason this is a good starting point is it provides an easy way to start creating content that can be shared through social media and then bring visitors back to your website. And if you’re worried that your business doesn’t have anything to write about, think about all the questions you receive from potential and current customers. By turning those topics into blog posts, you’ll start plenty of social media discussions, which can then yield additional topics that will make great posts.
Expand on Popular Blog Posts
Because writing a blog post is easier than creating an infographic or producing video content, blogging is a great way to test different ideas. Then when a post does perform really well, you can take the time to expand it into a richer format. By using this strategy, you’ll be able to expand your content into all kind of mediums. Fun facts, case studies, infographics, videos and even e-books are all types of content that can gain a lot of momentum through social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.
Take the Guesswork Out of Producing Great Social Media Content
Following everything we covered above is the best way to start producing great content for your company’s social media channels. While the above strategy will help you come up with interesting pieces, some will perform better than others. However, that doesn’t mean that you’ll have to continue guessing
The easiest way to take the guesswork out of producing content that’s going to perform great is by using the Send Social Media Dashboard. Because our dashboard makes it extremely easy to see all your social media statistics in one place, you can let real data guide your content efforts. Thanks to our easy monitoring, your team will know exactly what kind of content they should focus on producing for your target audience.
