It’s time to stop wasting your business’ time on social media and start investing in what truly matters. Social media is an amazing tool for engaging customers, but here’s how to do it right.
When social media became the next big thing, most marketers took advantage of this and got their brands out there. Businesses signed up for every service available, posted photos and updates and literally crossed their fingers, hoping for the best. While social media is a very important marketing channel, marketers and businesses need to invest the right amount of time on the right platforms. If you think you are pushing all the right buttons but aren’t seeing the hoped-for return, you may be investing too much time on social media. As with anything, moderation is key and there can be such a thing as too much social.
Ask yourself some questions
Start by asking yourself some important questions. How many social networks are you on? How many hours do you spend marketing on social? Do you have the required staff to manage your social profiles? How often are you posting content? Are you able to answer all of the questions and comments you are getting on your social media networks? Is the content on each platform identical? Are your other marketing channels being ignored in favour of social?
Your answers to these questions will determine if you are in over your head when it comes to social media marketing of your business. While there is value in having a profile on the big five: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and LinkedIn, if these aren’t managed well, you are wasting your time.
Managing your profiles
When we talk about managing your social media profiles, there are a number of basic things you should be doing regularly in order to keep up in the social media game:
- Following others – thought leaders, competitors, clients
- Monitoring other’s feeds so you can like and share their content
- Regularly sharing your own content
- Monitor posts (questions, comments) made to your page
- Answering messages sent to your account
If you aren’t able to do all of these things on a regular basis, something needs to change as this means you aren’t making the most out of being on social media. If you are doing all of these things, but it is taking up most of your time to do it, you might also want to reconsider if this is the best strategy for your business.
Analyzing your data
The great thing about social media is that it can give you miles of data, so you can best decide if it is worth it to continue. It is important to look at all of your networks often and see how well they are performing. Are you getting more followers on a regular basis? Are you getting the reach you’d hoped for on your shared content? Are you getting clicks each day/week/month?
Not only do you want to analyze what your social is doing, you’ll want to analyze all of your channels. Google Analytics is an amazing tool for telling you how traffic gets to your website and if social is low down on the list, you may want to spend more time on the channels that get you the traffic, or change your social strategies in order to get it higher on the list. As well, you’ll be able to see which social networks are performing the best and maybe weed out the ones that aren’t doing so great. Figuring out which ones are performing the best is a delicate formula of click through rate, bounce rate and social media sharing.
Assessing why
Now that you know what is performing and what isn’t, you’ll need to think about why some social networks aren’t doing so well. You probably know your target market, but do you know what networks your intended customers are using? If your target audience isn’t using certain networks, then it is a sure bet that you are wasting your time being on that network.
Where to go from here
Once you’ve figured out which networks are best for your business, there are a number of ways you can go from here. You can choose to pare down your accounts and only use the ones that are doing the best and where your target audience is residing. You can choose to hire someone with skilled knowledge of managing social media to manage your accounts for you and boost up the ones that aren’t performing.
Social media is definitely a valuable tool for marketing your business, but only if you know how (and when) to use it to give you the best advantage.
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