Social Media Monitoring: Understanding and Improving Your Social Media Marketing Results
Social media monitoring is important for your campaigns to develop and become more successful.
Back when social media first began to gain popularity in marketing, few people had the foresight to understand its true potential to transform the world – but that’s exactly what it has done. The influence of social media has been felt around the globe. The effects social media has on marketing and branding is exactly why your business must always be thinking about social media management.
Having a presence on social media is no longer an option for businesses. Part of successful social media marketing is understanding what it takes for proper social media monitoring and then modifying your strategies to take your platforms, and campaigns, to the next level.
Four Primary Social Media Indicators For Monitoring and Management
The first step in effective social media management is understanding the information gathered from every single post. By analyzing this data on a regular basis, you can begin to decide what works and what doesn’t. The four primary social media indicators are as follows:
Likes/Reactions
The easiest and quickest way to make note of how people are reacting to your social media posts is by checking to see the number of likes or other types of reactions they have. This will tell you if people are enjoying the content that you’ve been sharing. If you’re getting an angry face emoji, though, something is amiss with the post or the audience.
Content Shares
Likes and reactions are nice, but shares are so much better. This means that not only did the reader enjoy your content, but he or she thought that what you said or posted was important enough to share with others. This will help broaden your message’s reach and possibly increase your lead generation.
Post Clicks
There are loads of people who will try to get as many clicks on each post as they possibly can, which is why they sometimes turn to “clickbait.” You obviously want this number to be as high as possible, but it’s more useful when combined with likes and shares. Basically, if people are clicking but not liking or sharing, then you’re not properly engaging with them.
Post Comments
When you can get people to interact with your social media posts in a positive way, it means what you’re saying is worthy of discussion and interaction. This is, hands down, the best way to know that you’re doing something right. Yes, commenters might bicker amongst themselves, but that’s usually a good thing.
Effective Social Media Monitoring Strategy
Now that you understand the primary indicators, it’s time to take a look at how things are currently being done within your company and your overall social marketing strategy. This will inform you as to whether any tweaks to the methods being employed may be in order.
Here are the social media monitoring items to analyze:
Revisit Your Goals
Business social media goals often change over time or even at the drop of a hat. You may be focusing on growing your brand, getting new leads, advertising a specific product, or other such business need. Decide what you want to achieve both short-term and long-term, then check to see if your efforts are in line with your goals.
Use Proper Metrics
Depending on your goals, the metrics you utilize may be different. This can occur either as a whole or per campaign. If you’re interested in growing your brand awareness, for instance, then you’re most likely interested in volume and reach. On the other hand, promoting website traffic will be more focused with clicks, URL shares, and conversions.
Adjust Accordingly
You should never be afraid to change your marketing goals or techniques. In fact, that’s a big reason why you’re doing all of this in the first place. If something isn’t working, then making alterations and trying again is the only way that you’ll succeed further. Even if a campaign is effective, however, try not to simply copy the style and delivery too closely.
Seek Pro Assistance
Social media monitoring may seem simple on the surface, but you often need to know how to analyze the findings and interpret the trends. It’s always beneficial to turn to marketing professionals who can take all of your information, decipher it, and assist with new marketing campaigns. They can create something entirely new or tweak what already exists.
Tips to Improve Social Media Results
As you’ve probably realized by now, there are many cogs in this complicated machine known as social media. You won’t find any magic elixir or mathematical formula to hit it out of the park every time, but there are steps you can take to improve your social media marketing results.
Here are a few of our personal and professional favorites:
Don’t Always Be “Salesy”
Everyone knows that you have something to sell on social media, even if it’s just your company as a whole, but they don’t like when businesses are so obvious about it. It’s okay to make clear-cut sales posts – even every day – but make sure that you also have plenty of informational or entertaining posts. This will keep them coming back and avoid annoyance.
Interact with Posters
People who comment on social media posts love when the company responds in some way. If you get a crazy number of comments, you don’t have to reply to each and every one of them. Just try to stay active whenever you can. You should also take the opportunity to politely respond to any criticisms or complaints they might have.
Separate Platforms
Creating a single post and sending the exact same content to multiple platforms is akin to writing a generalized message on a dating app and sending it out to hundreds of people at once. When you want to convey the same information, simply write it and/or present it in a slightly different way. Consumers will often appreciate this level of variety.
Consider Influencers
Love ’em or hate ’em, influencers can often help your product reach a lot of people all at once. However, don’t just look for influencers who have a high follower count. It’s important that you concentrate only on influencers whose followers are most likely part of your target audience. This “quality over quantity” tactic will increase your likelihood of leads.
Hire a Professional
Even if your social marketing efforts appear to be doing well enough with someone in-house handling them, a professional marketing company will bring a whole lot more to the table. They’ll make sure that quality content is created and shared across multiple platforms to give you the best results possible. Plus, they’ll do so on a set schedule to provide consistency and reliability.
Contact P3 Agency for Social Media Monitoring and Creative Marketing Services
The marketing experts at P3 Agency has the skills needed to create an effective inbound marketing system that our clients can count on. Our team will tie together brand development, lead generation, local SEO services, web design services, social media monitoring, and other creative marketing strategies to provide you with the most comprehensive campaigns. For a free marketing assessment, give us a call at (800) 515-9422 now.