With a multiplicity of tools and such a tsunami of data available, you’d think that all a company needs is to produce content and post it on the web.
Wrong!
Here are a few solid-steps to begin building your strategy and optimizing your social media marketing.
Identifying Influencers
In the world of social media marketing the primary question to pose is who are my influencers?
The answer being they are the rainmakers who have an outsized impact and engagement with online communities. Someone who increases public awareness of product services and business news through a qualified social contract and the goodwill engendered with their audiences engagement and esteem for them as commentators and opinion formers.
Those who are highly interconnected and can alter the conversation via tweets, social media posts and blogs.
One such man we are particularly in awe of here at evvnt is David Skok’s blog http://www.forentrepreneurs.com
By being highly connected these kinds of people are like catalysts that can drive messages and engage communities to action.
Therefore identifying and reaching out to these trendsetters and weather makers will catalyse exposure and amplify awareness of your products, brand and services to a vastly larger audience.
Once you figure out how to achieve this aim effectively it will be compounded squared. Rememeber the Internet is viral.
So traditional methods such as scatter gun market targets and marketing intuition simply will not work with social.
In building an effective strategy it is absolutely critical to identify the influencers who can build and promote your brand and find the strategy that brings the punch to social media marketing.
Harnessing the metrics of tweet tracking, likes and shares but ignoring the quantity of these, but instead calibrating them to drive action, as well as monitoring the volume of interactions in social traffic and gauging online sentiment to qualify what is the right path for your social media communication campaign.
In sum: packaging your message to your community and not vice versa.
So what are the metrics that really matter to social media marketing?
- Site traffic: what content are people reading that is causing a spike in site traffic?
- Social conversations: who and how many people are discussing your brand?
- Social sharing: who is sharing your content and how many new people are exposed?
- Referrer data: how many people are referred to your website by an influencer or client?
- Conversions: who are those key influencers that are bringing more business your way?
The overriding priority here is to KISS, i.e. ‘Keep It Simple Stupid’
Stop counting likes, shares, tweets, etc. Instead focus on your influencers and their impact on content to determine how they are affecting your business’s bottom line.
So in conclusion, be aware that your strategy does not stop with the content itself. Instead build the social into your strategy to ramp up your social impact.