|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Social media is the best platform for marketing. This is because it’s the quickest, most direct, and frequently updated platform.
It’s an effective way to reach your target audience because it’s easy to track who views your content. Social media allows you to build interactive connections with your audience. Use social media as a customer service tool.
Customers can chat with people on social media platforms like Facebook. Finally, social media offers different avenues of content distribution. Examples are Facebook live or Snapchat stories. It is more likely that people will see them than email newsletters or traditional TV ads.
In this guide, I will tell you what you need to know about social media marketing for small businesses. I will cover the benefits of using social media marketing, how to set up a social media plan.
Why Social Media Marketing?
This article aims to break down the different aspects of social media marketing. For small businesses, it’s important to create a strong content strategy. Also, know which social channels are right for your business.
In today’s world, people have the power of voice. They don’t need to spend money on advertisements anymore. To reach their target audience, companies need to invest in social media. This means the use of channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
Creating content is not enough. Create engaging content that will make people want to share it with friends or followers. Also, understand how many followers you can realistically expect on each platform.
Every platform has content that performs well on it. This type of content may be a video on Instagram, GIFs on Facebook, or even images of your team on Linked In.
How to Measure Success with Social Media
Social media marketing can be a great way to generate leads and increase your visibility. The downside is that the content you publish on Facebook or Twitter needs to be engaging. It needs to be relevant to your audience for it to be successful.
Only 13% of B2B marketers believe they’ve proven social media has had an impact on their business.
You may be trying to make money on Facebook, grow your email list, or connect with new audiences. Using these tips will help you measure progress and keep track of what’s working.
The best way to measure the success of an SMM strategy is by followers, engagement, and impressions achieved. To measure success with SMM, evaluate your content.
For Facebook, this means looking at the number of likes, shares, and comments on posts. For Twitter, this means how many retweets, favorites, and replies you have on posts.
A more qualitative measure of success with SMM would be assessing the quality of engagement your posts are getting. Have people been liking or commenting on your posts? How many times have people retweeted or replied to one of your tweets?
Social Media Key Performance Indicators
Reach
- Reach includes followers – the number of people following your social media channels.
- Impressions – the number of times your people view your content.
- Brand Mentions – how often do people mention your brand across social media.
- Also, in comparison to your competition how many people are talking about you.
Engagement
For content, engagement, look at these KPIs.
- Likes or favorites – shows viewers appreciate your content.
- Comments mean they are directly engaging with your content.
- Ratings and reviews show a strong engagement and people willing to share their opinion.
Return on Investment (ROI)
- Direct sales Revenue – sales generated directly from social channels
- Lead conversions – leads converted from social media
- Support costs per customer – how much it costs your business to support social media pages
- The lifetime value of the customers – how much your business stands to make from one customer. Check the products and services that customers usually come back for. Try to articulate the value with an estimation.
Retention and Loyalty
- Issues resolved – Resolving conflict or customer complaints
- Service-level agreement – are you implementing your plans for social channels serving customers well.
- Time to resolution – how do you often respond to social queries
- Customer Satisfaction – happy customers tend to leave positive reviews and ratings
- Sentiment – your audience sharing their opinion about your content.
A successful strategy should have 5 key elements in it. These are:
- Content
- Influencers
- Visuals ( Ensure you use the right post sizes for every campaign )
- Storytelling
What Brands are Doing Well in Social Media Marketing?
Many social media analytics tools help understand users’ engagement rates. The following are some of the most popular social media analytics tools. These have helped brands create strategies with better understanding of their audience.
When it comes to social media channels, business accounts have insights for marketers.
- Facebook Business (Login and navigate to Insights)
- Twitter Analytics
- LinkedIn Analytics
- Pinterest Analytics
Key indicators of success.
Marketers are measured by how their programs and campaigns perform in generating leads and revenue. Lead generation and revenue are important contributors to business growth which influences this practice.
The following examples of metrics you can use to measure your social media return on investment.
- Sign-ups for email, webinars, and events
- Product downloads and trials
- Purchases directly from social channels
- Downloads of marketing materials
- Visit-to-lead conversion rate
- Competitor benchmarking – how well are you performing against competitors.
- Website traffic from social media
- Reach and engagement of your social pages
- Audience size for your social media pages
- Campaign results
The top 5 Key Takeaways.
The following are the top five key takeaways that every business owner should follow.
- Create a social media posting schedule. This gives your followers a sense of what to expect when they come back to your page in the future.
- Keep in mind that social media’s algorithms affect what shows up in news feeds. So make sure you are using relevant hashtags when posting content. Otherwise, your followers might not see it.
- Make sure you are responding to your customers on social media. This is especially if they have tagged you in their tweets or posts. As always, be honest and friendly when doing so!
- The best time for posting content on social media is different for every platform. But generally speaking, Monday through Thursday work best for Twitter. This is because Twitter has the highest engagement rates these days.
