Want to learn How to use Social Media Information to Create a Business Plan?
Social media has become an incredibly powerful business tool, especially bearing in mind that over 3 billion people are social media users in the world. And yet, many businesses fail to utilize the full potential and harness the power of this marketing strategy. Usually, the culprit behind poor results is their lack of skills.
In order to create a sound and effective social media strategy, it’s important to have a well-crafted plan followed by detailed analytics in order to see what works and what doesn’t.
Let’s discuss how to make the most of your social media efforts.
How do you build a well-informed strategy based on the most important metrics?
How to you know which are the most important metrics?
People are sharing more information than ever on social media, and to a large expect, this is information that you as a brand can leverage in your marketing, and this also includes when creating your business plan.
In this article, you’ll learn How to use Social Media Information to Create a Business Plan.
What are social media metrics?
Before we get to this important question, it would be good to establish types of social media there are. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn are social media channels in the narrowest sense of that word, but it’s better to broaden your scope and take another approach by including, among other things, blogging, discussion forums, Q&A sites, and consumer review networks in the picture.
This way you have more opportunities to engage and interact with your target audience and connect with them on a more profound level. To be able to understand how each of those social media channels is performing and how successful your marketing efforts are, you need social media metrics.
These data and analytics provide you with useful insight into the effectiveness of your strategy. Social media metrics can be universal and network-specific, while some are calculated in a different manner depending on the tool you’re using. It’s true that the numbers of likes, shares, comments, and clicks are important metrics as they show how interested your target audience is in your content, but it’s important to dig deeper and learn how to engage them even more.
What are you measuring?
Many marketers usually rely on the easily perceived, superficial analytics to show their clients the performance of their latest campaign. In other words vanity metrics.
This includes things like new followers, retweets, shares, or regrams are undeniable signs of engagement and are important indicators of the effectiveness of your social media post or a piece of content.
What’s missing in the equation is how they affect your client’s bottom line. This valuable information can’t be obtained without a reliable social media monitoring tool that should find its place in your social media arsenal. Here are some of the most important metrics that can help you understand how your campaigns are working:
- Reach tells you how many unique people have seen your social media post, thus illustrating how big your audience is and how far your message goes.
- In the same vein, comments and shares can be used to track your conversation rate and amplification rate respectively. The point is in putting all your metrics in a context and calculating the percent of your following.
- Click-through rates are an extremely important metric as they show you how relevant and compelling your social posts are. To be able to understand how much you’re actually capitalizing on the content you share, pair them with your bounce rate. This way you’ll see the number of people who come to your website by clicking on a tweet or Facebook post, and leave without viewing other content. A high social media bounce rate is an indicator that you’re targeting the wrong audience, especially if dwell time of visitors who come to your website via Google searches or paid ads is longer.
- Mentions are excellent for illustrating the effects of your social media efforts on your brand awareness. To unleash the power of this metric take a look at the big picture by tracking your share of voice. Find out what percentage of social mentions in your industry is about your brand. Now find out what percentage is about your competition. With the help of this metric, you can tweak your efforts and become a leader in your industry.
- Leads generated through your social media efforts are among the most important metrics. Some of the best trackable methods of generating qualified leads via social media are sharing gated content, running contests, or promoting free trials.
Set your goals
Just like it’s the case with any other strategy, it’s essential to set your goals and work towards accomplishing them. Some of the most common social media goals are:
- Improving your brand awareness. Track your follower count, reach, and the number of shares, likes, comments, and mentions, and try to organically increase them. One of the best ways to do this is by responding to comments and mention across your social media channels. This way you’ll keep your existing following engaged and expand your reach by stealing some of these popular blogs’ thunder.
- Driving traffic to your website. Social media should help you warm up your followers. This will send them to your website, where they will be converted into buying customers. To do this, produce useful, high-quality content, and promote it on social media. HubSpot managed to increase their blog traffic by 241% through various social media promotions.
- Building a loyal community around your brand. Establish a superb customer service, as it’s one of the best methods for improving customer experience, and, subsequently, retention. Work on shortening your response times. Make sure to encourage customers to ask questions. This will allow you to track and improve customer satisfaction scores.
This is how you will know how to change it in order to meet your customers’ expectations. This is crucial for fine-tuning your offer and planning social media budget more precisely.
About the author
Claudia Paisley Propp, graduated journalist, digital marketing lover, based in Sydney. Copywriting, Online Marketing… Lets just say – Communication in all shapes and sizes is her passion and what she does best. She is that lucky girl who gets to live her dream. Here to share her knowledge and write about latest trends in (social) media. Writes for Bizzmark blog.
