Here are 5 tips to help you start getting better results from social media with very little investment and with strong systems in place to measure your success.
Measure Your Success On Social Media
#1: Identify Your Target Market and Listen to Them
The first step to measuring success in social media marketing is proper scope. There are new social networks popping up each week. It’s a waste of resources to join every new social network only to find you have no time to manage them. Find out where your most active customers & influencers spend time online – then listen and take notes.
Here’s some tools you can use to tune into the conversation: Technorati, Google Blog Search, Bloglines and Twitter Search. More advanced social media monitoring tools include Radian6 and Techrigy.
#2: Get Involved in Conversations
The second step towards success is consistently utilizing social media to engage prospective customers. When you start listening to conversations, you might hear some things about your company that aren’t very complimentary. That’s ok. Your job now is to engage these customers and find a way to help. Be willing to acknowledge mistakes when they happen. Customers are surprisingly forgiving if a company engages in an honest and egoless manner.
If you’re one of the lucky companies who only have enthusiastic and happy customers, recognize their desire to interact with you and be generous with your time. Be open to engaging with them on their turf. They’ll reward your brand with greater enthusiasm – which is a message that spreads through social networks like wildfire, and solidifies your brand.
Happy, satisfied Retro Lounge & Grill customers
For instance, on Twitter both Starbucks and Whole Foods share customer comments, local specials, and ask customers what their favorite items are. On Facebook, Retro Lounge & Grill share their upcoming events, specials and ask their fans what is their favorite thing to do at Retro? It’s casual and open, yet share important information and get feed back. This activity go a far way to enhancing the attractiveness of these brands. Check out some of the brands on Twitter, and implement some of their conversation techniques.
#3: Give! Give! Give!
How involved is your team in communicating with prospective customers, influencers and current customers on social networking sites? How often are you publishing great content that helps your prospects do their jobs? How often do you blog, Tweet, post photos on Flickr, comment on other blogs, Podcast, upload videos, etc? The more content that you produce and publish on social media sites, the more traffic you can attract back to your website. If your site is designed well to convert visitors into leads, these activities will help you increase sales.
#4: Master the Tools of the Trade
Social media strategy should tie to business and communication strategy, rather than being based on the available tools. But it is not possible to develop a social media strategy without at least having an understanding of the various tools that are available, their functionality and purposes, and the kinds of audiences and conversations for which they might be best suited.
Master The Appropriate Social Media Tools
It’s critical to tie your business strategy to your social media strategy. However, without a knowledge of what social media and social networking sites enable you to do, it’s hard to know how to do that. It’s important to establish a blog as your home base. Then, learn the capabilities of each site to help you interact. For example, Twitter provides an almost unfettered ability to connect with your prospective clients. But, it only allows you to type 140 characters at a time. So, maybe a video posted to YouTube would be a better way to publish a “how-to”. Linkedin & Facebook let you see who your contacts know. But, Facebook makes it much easier to connect with them. LinkedIn Answers is a much better place to answer business focused questions than any other social network.
It’s important to learn how to use these sites in order to get business value out of your social media activity. Talk to an expert to determine where to spend your time to get the best return.
#5: Use Website Analytics Software to Measure Leads and Sales.
Many experts agree that social media will affect the next generation of search engine optimization techniques as search engines start to use the signals we collectively leave as we network and share media online. Presently, social media activity affects the success of inbound marketing techniques like:
- Search engine ranking
- Social book marking activity
- Social networking connections
- Video/podcast views/listens
- Inbound links
- RSS subscriptions
- Comments on your blog
- Mentions of your brand
- Number of times people search for your brand
- Visitors (first-time and repeat) to your website or blog
The end goal is lead generation and sales. Use tracking codes, a solid analytics package like FREE Google Analytics and closed loop marketing in order to track the visits, leads and sales that occur as a result of your social media activities.
How do you define success on Social Media? Are you succeeding, are you happy with your progress? Do share via our comment section.
I think point #1 is critical. Often, companies are not listening enough before creating social media content. It’s important to understand the needs and desires of your target audience before helping to define problems and provide solutions.