Do you work in digital marketing and wonder how to boost participation on social media? Or maybe you’ve been doing digital marketing for a while, but you’re having trouble adapting to new developments.
If you run a business, specialise in helping others grow their businesses, or are just getting started with your own personal branding strategy, you need to have a firm grasp on how to maximise your presence on the various social media platforms.
Keeping ahead of the competition during your next social media campaign doesn’t have to involve exhausting yourself.
Why Is It Crucial to Use Social Media Effectively?
People are active on social media, and they aren’t just wasting time because they’re bored; they’re using it to connect with real people and make purchases. It’s technically at the top of the sales funnel, but in practise, we’re using it to make direct sales.
When done right, social media can be used as a sales tool in addition to a means of communication, engagement, and education. Using Instagram to advertise a current sale, for instance, can pay huge dividends if you create an engaging ad with a catchy photo and headline.
Remember that the primary goal of social media is interpersonal communication. The key to successfully connecting via social media is humour, interaction, using the appropriate platforms for your target audience, and monitoring your metrics.
It’s important to keep in mind that your ultimate goal isn’t to “make a sale,” but rather to build relationships.
Aspects of Direct and Remarketing
You, as a marketer, are likely aware that a variety of resources exist to assist you in streamlining your operations and, if applicable, tailoring your social media content to your ideal customers.
Ads on Facebook automatically target your audience based on the criteria you set. To enter the most useful metrics, however, you must first grasp what they are. Even if you aren’t having instantaneous success in this area, don’t give up; instead, keep trying, testing, and monitoring to find what works best.
Ads can be shown to people who have already visited your site through a process called remarketing. You can retarget on individual platforms with the help of remarketing tools like those offered by Google and Facebook, or you can use a tool like AdRoll to segment and target users across multiple search engines and social media platforms at once.
Apply Appropriate Metrics
Selecting the most pertinent metrics to monitor should be a key part of your social media strategy. You can then make the right decisions about your next moves based on this data. It’s not always a walk in the park, even for arithmetic enthusiasts.
In addition to Google Analytics, other useful tools for measuring metrics include Crawlytics and BuzzSumo.
There is a wealth of resources out there, but the real trick is to use them to collect the data you need and then use creative interpretation to learn more about your target audience’s habits and preferences. It is intended that readers will look past the figures to the narrative they tell.
Sprout Social suggests using these four metrics to measure your social media marketing efforts:
How your reputation is being shaped by what others are saying and seeing
Involvement-oriented metrics
Connecting interaction with sales
Influence in the Big Picture
Key performance indicators (KPIs) should also be segmented. For instance, only those who have a serious interest in converting via social media should consider counting this. If this is the case, your lead conversion rate and other non-monetary conversions will be important metrics to consider in addition to your revenue.
A few hours per month is all that should be spent on analytics if you’re doing it right.
Take Advantage of Social Media to Communicate with and Service Your Clients
While Twitter’s 140-character limit and seemingly random stream of content can put off some users, it’s actually being used by many brands to strategically increase their customer service efforts and consistently maintain positive relationships with their customers. Several instances are as follows:
Xbox now has a dedicated support Twitter page where they post their hours and update followers in real time on any service disruptions, bugs, or wait times.
The use of customer feedback in the form of quotes and testimonials can go a long way towards winning over a sceptical crowd.
Chatbots are guiding a growing number of real-time messages and have even been integrated into Facebook’s private messaging system, demonstrating the steady development of AI-based chat and call-back programmes.
Changing up your content’s format can boost engagement
Wordstream found that over 80% of Twitter users watch videos, and nearly 50% of social media users watch at least an hour of video via Facebook or YouTube every day.
Whether you’re a professional filmmaker or just want to use video to say “hi” to your friends while you’re at home, everyone has the tools they need to make and share their own videos these days (a great way to practice). If you’ve already produced a substantial number of videos, you should probably investigate the successes and failures of your strategies.
And there are a plethora of opportunities for diversification in other ways as well: If you want to keep your content interesting and relevant, you can use ad integration in Instagram Stories or create simple images using free or cheap tools like Canva.
Create New Means of Communication
One key distinction between digital and traditional marketing is the increased emphasis on genuineness in the former. Smart companies recognise this and focus on building a sense of community around their product.