Social media marketing is definitely effective for businesses of all types.
Many brands find it difficult to calculate the ROI of a social media campaign. Some companies have decided to stop using social media for marketing purposes. Even though some people might say that it’s difficult to measure the success of social media marketing campaigns in terms of ROI, the truth is that it is very possible to track KPIs and find out how successful the campaign was. The challenge for some businesses, especially those without access to the right resources, may be proving it. 41% of businesses do not know how social media is positively impacting their business. It is difficult for brands to measure the financial impact social media sites have on their business growth because it is hard to determine how much of the growth is due to social media and how much is due to other factors. The answer is a lack of proper goal-setting. When creating a social media strategy, you should be clear about how you will achieve results. But if you don’t have the right goals, you won’t have a direction, and your social media presence will be weak. Research indicates that social media marketing budgets in the US will go up from $7.52 billion in 2014 to $18.58 billion in 2021. Although spending money on social media can be beneficial in the long run, businesses will only see results if they have specific goals for what they want to achieve.
To make your social media marketing journey smoother, your business needs to invest in the right tools and resources. By doing this, you will be able to save time, money, and energy in the long run.
- Set strategic, specific goals that are attainable and easy to measure at every step.
- Have a strong commitment to creating quality social media content.
Leveraging social media is not rocket science.
It will work as long as it is used alongside other business growth strategies.
This is why it is important to focus on both the content of your social media posts and the way you market them.
- An understanding of your target audience
- The creative aspect of posting content
- Having strong attention to detail
- The right level of data crunching
- The long-term vision of your business
If you want social media to be effective for your business, you need to set some clear goals. Figure out what you want to achieve through social media, and then put together a plan to make it happen.
Step #1: Know Your Main Objective
Your social media objective is tied in with your social media goals, but it’s not the same as theirs.
The main goal of your social media marketing should be clear so that you know what you are trying to achieve.
It comes much before your goals.
It is beneficial to know your objectives regardless of what kind of business you are running.
to drive more traffic to your website, or to improve the visibility of your brand, social media can be a powerful business tool Whether you’re looking to improve your revenue numbers with social media, drive more traffic to your website, or improve the visibility of your brand, social media can be a powerful business tool.
guest blogging can help you achieve your goals. If your goal is to either grow your traffic or establish your brand as an influencer, guest blogging can help you achieve those goals.
…or drive traffic to your website,
To achieve your goal, you must be clear about what you want to achieve and identify the steps that will help you reach your objective.
Your social media goals should act as a roadmap to achieving your core objectives.
Your social media goals should deal with the specifics of your broad objective. The success of a task is often reliant on the smaller details.
It is essential that you know what your objectives are before you set any goals. Otherwise, your goals will not be aligned with what you want to achieve.
Your social media marketing goals should be strong and achievable.
Their success depends on a strong foundation, which is your main business goal.
By following a proven framework, achieving your social media goals becomes easier.
The SMART goal-setting method is a unique and effective way to set goals.
This allows you to create goals that are not only worthy but also practical.
Goals that follow the SMART framework are…
- Specific: The more clear and more defined your goal is, the better.
- Measurable: You should be able to track and measure your goal.
- Achievable: Is your goal really achievable? Or too far-fetched?
- Realistic: Your goal needs to be practical and realistic in terms of the resources you have.
- Time Sensitive: Whether long-term or short-term, your goal has to have a clear time frame.
Before you set your social media goals, it is important to establish your baseline targets.
Without a strong social media presence, your marketing will be weak and ineffective.
Conducting a social media audit will help you establish baseline targets and make sure that each goal you set is focused.
A social media audit is a process of reviewing all of your social media accounts to ensure that they are effective and up-to-date.
According to HubSpot:
Are you regularly examining your social media channels to make sure they are representing your brand well? This includes both your business’s official profiles as well as any impostor accounts.
Are you sure that the effort you are putting into social media marketing is as effective as it could be?
Conducting a social media audit allows you to assess whether your social media use is resulting in financial returns.
An audit is necessary to determine which areas need improvement.
Instead of spending time fixing something that doesn’t need to be fixed, you can spend time improving things that actually need to be improved.
In other words, you can see what is working well and what needs to be improved with your social media marketing campaign.
Adding OKRs to your goals gives them more depth.
The main objective we talked about in step one is not the same as OKRs.
OKRs are objectives that focus on key results.
The first step was about the big picture, but OKRs are about the details.
You need OKRs in order to achieve the big picture and make sure things go well. It’s necessary to get the smaller details right in order to achieve this.
You will be decreasing your macro goals.
Step #5: Measure the Right Metrics
It’s important to measure the right metrics when you’re trying to achieve social media goals because then you’ll be able to identify what’s driving your success.
Or, what factors are hindering it?
Many people argue that social media is only concerned with “vanity metrics”, which are not important.
But that’s not completely true.
You can tell if you are making progress by looking at things like comments, likes, shares, and the number of followers you have.
And if your audience is engaging with your social media activity.
Your social media metrics can help you understand how your efforts are doing in comparison to your competition.
Here’s How You Can Measure Your KPI on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+
Twitter currently boasts more than 550 million active users. 67% of the half-billion users who follow brands are more likely to buy from brands they follow than from brands they do not.
Follower Growth
This graphic represents the change in the number of people following your company over time. If you want to increase the amount of traffic to your site, you need to increase your reach. It’s as simple as that. Followerwonk has a great feature that allows you to track who your followers are when they follow and unfollow you, and other analytics.
Frequency
How often are you tweeting? Make a note of how many times you tweet in a given time frame, and see how this affects your follower growth. Is there a correlation between the two? If you want to continue growing your following, you will need to make some changes. Some experts believe that there is no one “ideal” tweeting frequency that fits all cases, while others suggest that there is. You need to experiment with different frequencies to see which ones your followers respond to the best.
Engagement
A brand with a large number of followers is impressive, but if those followers don’t interact with the brand, there’s not much to boast about. If you’re not regularly engaging with your followers, you’re not making an impression on them. In my eyes, that’s the biggest failure of all
When someone Retweets one of your tweets, they are re-posting it to their own followers. This exposes your tweets to a whole new group of people who may not have seen them otherwise. It’s a good idea to brainstorm how you can convert your loyal “favorites” to loyal “retweeters.” Here are a few tips and tricks that can help promote retweeting:
- Include retweetable words (ex: “please,” “retweet,” “10,” and “You”)
- Don’t be afraid to ask people to “please retweet”, it increases the chance of retweeting by 160%!
- Tweet interesting links (56.69% of all retweets contain a link!)
- Limit your tweets to 80-110 characters. This makes it easier for others to retweet your content and leaves room for them to customize.
- Tweet during times when the majority of your followers are online. You can find this out using a tool like Followerwonk.
The tweet engagement rate is the number of retweets and favorites a tweet receives in relation to the number of followers the account has. When someone retweets your content, they are sharing your original tweet with all of their followers, which could potentially expose your content to a much wider audience.
Content Type
You should keep track of what kinds of things you tweet – for example, if you make an Excel spreadsheet that includes your tweet, the content type, and how many times it’s been retweeted and favorited. What content gets the most engagement?
Use the findings of your research to adapt your content to what will resonate the most with your followers. There are web tools that can track content type, or you can use a spreadsheet to keep track of your content and engagement.
Brand Mentions
To see how much your brand is being talked about on Twitter, create a Twitter list that includes your brand’s name. The Sprout Social media monitoring feature allows you to quickly and easily see what people are saying about your brand online.
If you keep track of when and where your brand is mentioned, you can learn what your strong points are, what needs to be improved, and who your customer base is.
It is more important to be in the loop in order to grow your brand’s reputation. Even if it’s something as small as a “Thanks for sharing!” be sure to always respond appropriately to mentions. This will let people know that you’re listening and is the ultimate sign of good customer service.
Facebook provides its users with a much more sophisticated set of analytics compared to Twitter, this can be found through Facebook insights (which is only available for brand pages).
Page Like Growth
We discussed how having more followers on Twitter means having more reach. This is also true for other social media platforms.
Reach
The reach of a post is the number of people who saw it. This is an important metric to track if you are running paid ads. You want to make sure your money is being well spent if you are investing in advertisements. Once you’ve figured out your reach, experts
Engagement
Facebook’s algorithm, EdgeRank, places an enormous importance on engagement. If you want your company updates to be seen by your followers, they need to be liking, commenting, and sharing your posts.
To gauge how engaging your fans find you, pay attention to how many post clicks, likes, comments, and shares you get. The metric you should worry about most, however, is shares. When followers share your content, it reaches a wider audience.
The more people you reach, the more potential customers you have, and the more money you can make.
Google+
There are540 million active monthly users on Google+. This is a channel that cannot be ignored. It is difficult to track useful statistics from Google, as their API does not allow third-party apps to report on many of them.
Follower Growth
It’s important to keep track of your follower base growth on any social media platform, including Google+. This is a good way to gauge your audience engagement and track your progress. There are tools available, like SproutSocal and Buffer for Business, which allow you to track your +1’s, comments, and shares.
Post Engagement Rate
The post engagement rate measures the total number of +1s, comments, and shares of posts during a set time period. This measurement tells you how well your engagement efforts are working by showing the change in numbers over time.
suggested that you investigate whether it would be a good investment for your company to spend money on Facebook ads by looking at HubSpot’s guide on ROI for Facebook ads.
Conclusion
Tools like Google Analytics can help you track your social media traffic and conversion rates.
The more you understand how social media is helping you to make sales, the more you can improve your social media strategy.
You’re more likely to have success with social media if you focus on measuring your results.
If you’re looking to up your social media game this year, consider taking some tips from the pros.
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