Marketing Effectively on Social Media

Social Media Marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. The appeal of social media marketing is that it allows brands to connect with their target audiences. But, why is this important to your business? I think this can be summed up into 3 categories; Why everyone should have a social strategy, measuring your metrics/setting goals, and streamlining workflow and tips on posting.  

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Why Everyone Should Have a Social Strategy

Let’s jump right in. Essentially, social media builds brand awareness and leads to success with your product or service. So, why should you have a social strategy? Well, it’s more important than ever when broadening your social and branding reach. Huge corporations that we know like American Airlines, the NFL, and Redbull have taken their marketing strategies to the next level on Facebook, Instagram and even TikTok. So, why is this? Why is this so important in 2022 and for the foreseeable future? Well, as we know, social media is a great way to build authority, brand awareness, communicate/build relationships with your audience, provide support and much more. But, although big brands make this look easy, you might be wondering how? This answer to the question will have to date back to when social media started and what exactly has changed, leading us to where we are today.

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Facebook For Business

For the last 16 years Facebook has been evolving into what we know it as today. A place where you can buy and sell, add friends, connect with distant relatives and most importantly promote your business. But how are social media platforms efficient? They are efficient because they work off algorithms. Algorithms are responsible for delivering relevant or entertaining content to the right audience, depending on their habits, interests, hobbies and much more. This is the part of social media that is ever changing, providing the user with a streamlined amount of content that is not overwhelming but not boring.

Everything you do on social media is more efficient, is more consistent and for our numbers people, all the data is trackable. Although Facebook is one of the largest, it is not the only platform that is available and successful in delivering your brand’s voice, generating leads, and building brand awareness. You may know how to run a business, but running your business on Facebook is much different. You need to build a strategy — so, I want to focus on a few key points to remember, because it’s not as easy as just posting and hoping people see your content.

Some people have success with going viral off of one video, but it’s not the case for most marketers, so you need to have a solid plan written and in place. Facebook may not be right for you and your business, and you may want to look into Instagram.

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Instagram for Business

Instagram has simplified and streamlined their process in order to maintain its nearly half a billion daily users. The 3 main functions of instagram are:

• Aesthetics
• Stories/Live Video
• Paid Advertising

For example, Instagram makes it almost too easy to go from an ad to the site and to a purchase. Users on Instagram tend to follow what is called page aesthetics, and what this means is when a user has a specific theme or style on their photos or they have overall consistency throughout their posts. Having an aesthetically pleasing feed makes your page instantly recognisable, which increases brand recognition while also showing off your skillset or products in a creative way.

But, what else makes Instagram great? Things like stories and live videos give you direct and easy communication with your audience. You can also use paid advertising on instagram whether that’s paid ads or paying an influencer to showcase your product or service. Most companies use Facebook and Instagram as part of their strategy, but we can’t forget about Linkedin.

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LinkedIn is Useful

LinkedIn allows users to connect, share ideas, comment helpful tips and most importantly apply for jobs. This is most likely the reason you’ll use LinkedIn. The platform makes it easy to post jobs and find candidates to recruit.

All that being said, when you’re building your strategy, review your goals and pick the platforms that best suit you. It may take some time to find which platforms will work best for your business, so metrics tracking will help you get an exact answer. Let’s jump into how to measure metrics and what you should do with them.

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Measuring Metrics and Setting Goals

Metrics tracking can be defined as what is reality vs what is expected out of your social media strategy. Metric tracking is the hard numbers that show how well you are performing on the platforms of your choice and instead of being a data analyst, there are a few resources that may help you get started or stay ahead of the game.

It can also show how your audience is interacting with your content, other content and overall where you can take advantage of perfect timing.

For example, if you were to go into your metrics and you conclude that your most views or interactions with posts were around noon, this would be a good time to continue posting. Another great aspect of metric tracking is the ability to report these results. This can ultimately result in a larger budget for social media marketing, a larger marketing team and even generate more sales or leads. Metrics are a great way to see if you’re headed in the right direction with your marketing strategy, but I want to talk about 3 metrics that are easily trackable.

• Engagement Metrics
• Awareness Metrics
• ROI (Return on Investment)
• CTR (Click Through Rate)

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Engagement Metrics

Let’s start with engagement metrics, because it’s such a broad subject in reference to social media. These numbers are relatively easy to track because they include the obvious things like comments, likes, shares, and clicks. Most of the information is laid out for you on the insights page, or if you use a reporting tool, but you still need to pay attention to what exactly the engagement is about.

High engagement doesn’t always mean positive engagement.

Pay attention to what’s being posted on your page and engage with your audience, like responding to reviews or replying to comments. That being said, I want to expand on awareness metrics.

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Awareness Metrics

Awareness metrics are specifically how many people your posts are reaching and how many impressions you’re making. The key difference here is that, for example, if I were to see a post 5 times, that’s 5 impressions but only 1 person reached. This is where the impressions and engagement can get mixed up but either way, you can tell how much your posts are being seen. This also comes into play when looking at video metrics, because you’ll want to look at the views, the average view duration of the viewer, and your comments and likes. So, with a little more information on how to pull these numbers from your posts, we need to talk about what we think is the most important aspect which is ROI or Return on Investment.

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ROI (Return on Investment) Metrics

ROI metric tracking can arguably be the most important, as this is what is paying for you to be on social media in the first place and can tell you if you are getting the same value as you are putting in effort. Google analytics is a great place to look for these numbers.

An example of a ROI metric is click through rate. This rate is how often your ad or link is clicked on and how it results in leads or sales. A good way to put this to use, is by adding CTA’s or Call to Action buttons on your post. This can look something like posting about a new product or service and putting the direct link underneath your caption. This way, your audience doesn’t have to go out of their way to view the product or service, even if it’s just curiosity. With easy access, curiosity can easily turn into a sale, it’s all about how you promote them.

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Referral Metrics

Another space you can track is referrals and this refers to the amount of website traffic you generate from your social platforms. You may be wondering how this is different from the CTR, or Click through Rate. So, let me give you an example.

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How CTR Differs from Referrals

• A CTR metric is when a customer clicks on an ad or a link that was purposely posted.
• A referral is referring to the idea of the customer navigating to your website just from a brand awareness post.

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Conversions

The last metric but certainly not least, is conversions. These are different from CTR and referrals because these numbers show sales, money that was generated through your social media, ads or promotions.

Now that you know a bit more about tracking, you need to set goals. Good social media goals align with your business goals.

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Why You Need Social Media Goals

Examples of these goals align with the metrics I mentioned before. But, why do they matter? Social media goals matter because it allows for you to stay on budget, show ROI or return on your investment, and align with business goals. Some of the most popular goals setting metrics include: Increase brand awareness, engagement, conversions and insights.

The best way to set up goals and metrics is to set SMART goals.

• S (specific)
• M (measurable)
• A (attainable)
• R (relevant)
• T (time bound)

No matter your SMART goals, you can always improve and change depending on your target audience. Now that you have set goals and are ready to track, we’re going to jump into streamlining your social media presence as well as a few tips on how you can make more attractive posts.

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Streamlining Workflow and Tips on Posting

Streamlining your social media strategy is key when it comes to posting relevant content without being stressed about being late to post or trend, or missing a time when your audience is active.

We recommend using a social media scheduling tool to help you post consistently across all your platforms. It allows for you or your social team to stay ahead so you can be focused on other tasks. Using a tool like Hootsuite allows for easy posting and editing and even shows recommended times to post based on your existing posts activity. In addition to Hootsuite, there are so many platforms out there that may work better for what you’re needing.

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Content Creation in a Nutshell

So, once you’ve figured out a tool to use, it’s time to start creating content. The content that you post depends on a lot of things, but mainly you’ll want to personalize your business and create a consistent brand voice. I know that may seem vague, but when you get into the swing of posting you’ll start to figure out what works best for your business. We recommend the following posts as you get started.

We recommend using a mix of educational and local content.

Educational content shows your audience what your product or service is about, how they can get started or even how they can make a purchase. Local content is important as well, because it showcases your work and shows the people behind your business.

As you navigate through what you will post, you want to find things that will spark engagement. Like I said before, not all engagement is positive but don’t panic if you get anything negative on your page.

For example, if you post a product and a customer who purchased the product in the past leaves a bad comment, you now have the opportunity to publicly show them that you want to make it right and you want them to have the best experience, thus turning it into a positive interaction.

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More than just the Caption

**But, captions are not the only thing that make a post attractive. The use of good photos, graphics, trends like carousels and reels, also need to be posted with an appropriate caption. Having someone creative on your team can really help to create a theme and overall look and feel for your page.

This part of the process can change depending on what your viewers find attractive and what results you see in your metric tracking. All in all, have fun with your content and remember that it is your page, your product and your audience, so do what is best pleasing for all things considered.

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Moving Forward

Now that you have information overload, it’s time to put these tools, tips and tricks to use on your social media channels. Remember your social media presence is completely customizable and can change based on your business’s goals. Have fun with your social media, engage with your audience, keep your eye out for trends and always have something you are working toward.

As always, if you’d like the stress of social media management off your plate, Tier Level is here for all your social media, website, and SEO needs. I hope you found this article to be helpful and that it guides you in the right direction.