Are you trending? How to improve social media effectiveness
Social media is exploding as a way to build a community of followers and share your message with them in an efficient and cost-effective manner. How do you evaluate which social media platforms are working for you? How do you prioritize your time?
It’s a big topic, but here are four areas of focus:
Have a plan. The key to any successful social media channel is to be clear about this: What question are you answering for your audience? Answering this question will keep your social message on point and relevant. Based on your goals, mission statement and branding, start creating messaging categories that are in line with your business. This is your “voice” and it needs to be appropriate to your brand, industry and audience.
Work patiently. To make your social media investment worthwhile you need to manage your time. Break down your strategy and goals into quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily objectives. Miscellaneous business tasks can easily derail your social media strategy, so keeping track of objectives will help you, or your team, stay on task and be more effective all around. It takes time to see results from social media. You need time to develop relationships and establish a credible reputation with fellow influencers and your audience. The early phase of building an audience is usually the most time consuming and requires the most effort, but the good news is that the bigger your audience gets the easier it is to grow and expand.
Measure. From the start, analyze the success of your efforts and keep in mind that the smallest developments are huge improvements. As long as you are increasing your followers and engagement a little each week, you are doing well. Track the number of interactions generated in your social media channels. Measure your Facebook “likes”, Twitter retweets and @reply, blog comments, Facebook page comments, YouTube video views and content embeds. Gauge your website traffic from social media. This will give you an idea of the percentage of unique visitors that come to your website through social media channels.
Adjust: As you monitor your actions, if something is not working after a long period of time, you need to adjust or eliminate it. If you find certain messaging is not resonating with your audience then change it. If your brand is growing on Facebook and Twitter, but stalling on LinkedIn, re-evaluate your efforts and invest your time in the platforms that are working or try another platform.
Planning and outlining your strategy in full will give you greater success and more engagement than other businesses that jump-in haphazardly. Stick with your carefully planned strategy, making small adjustments based on your analytic assessment, and you will see improving results from your social media efforts.
If you need help maximizing your online presence, let us know at jjewell@valcort.com
Tags: social media effectiveness