Cash in on the various social media channels that serve your specific business needs
Here’s a piece of news you may not have got wind of yet — social media has a lead-to-close rate that is 100% more than outbound marketing. Also 24% of companies that spend on social media see a straight rise in revenue as per a recent QuickSprout Report.
That’s not all. According to the sixth annual report on the state of social media marketing by Social Media Examiner — “By spending as little as six hours per week, over 66% of marketers saw increased lead generation with social media,”. According to Sam Kusinitz in a HubSpot article, 16 Stats That Prove Social Media Isn’t Just a Fad. This undoubtedly validates the case for a higher spend on social media marketing services.
Now the question is how can you zero in on the social media marketing channels that will best serve your business purpose? Let’s figure it out:
A Crystal Clear Purpose
For starters, ask yourself, what’s the main aim of your social media activity?
For instance, if it is brand awareness, choose a well-known web platform to nail this task. Facebook’s paid promotions could be the first bet. Spend as per your budget, else even the organic route of free advertising, if cleverly delivered can work, writes Sophie Smith in How to Choose the Best Social Media Channels for Your Business, penned for Digital Marketing Institute.
Are You Gunning for Leads?
As Smith remarks, from the B2B communication perspective, LinkedIn is best suited for the job. The platform offers direct contact with potential business partners, business groups in your niche market, as well as gives your brand the opportunity of being seen and heard during discourses and conversations as part of a slew of closed or open groups, relevant to your industry. Facebook and Twitter, are also useful for B2C kind of communication, as well as a carefully considered use of Google’s Ads. Once you have understood what you want to put out in your market communication, you need to accurately figure out whom to address must know whom you want to address yourself to?
Know Your Target
Companies can opt for social listening systems such as Sprout Social extract demographical information on customer metrics, such as age, gender and location in order to be able to pitch to or engage the same set of followers, wherever they are present on other social media platforms. This kind of information will make it easier for you to pick the best social media channels for marketing a particular product or service.
If you want new add-on a new or never-tried social media channel to your media mix, refer to this Pew Research Center report that discloses the vital metrics for numerous social media platforms. Illustratively, women are more Instagram users than men; the difference is 31 and 24. A lot of more precise distribution data can be extracted from this report to draw the big picture of the universe you want to target through your social media campaigns. Study these statistics before taking your call. No point in following the herd blindly. For instance, if you already know that your products is meant for tween consumption, your choice automatically zeroes in on Snapchat, besides of course the more standard options of FB and Twitter.
Another recommended study for social media users and enthusiasts is Facebook Insights, says the author of Finding the Best Social Media Channels for Your Business, by ThriveHive, a marketing, advertising and event solutions company.
Retaining Your Target’s Interest
Retention is always more challenging than acquisition.
Let’s assume ABC is looking at increasing its social media shares by at least 20% over the next three months. One strategy, if it already has some traffic on its social media pages is to now take the inorganic route with paid advertising. It’s always useful to put some additional bucks on good, interesting and informative content that has the potential to go viral. However plan your paid promotions, carefully.
Draw up a calendar of sorts, linked to your marketing objectives of the year — event promotions, product launches, national and international conferences etc. Be wary of writing too much about the company’s sales and products. You may lose interest by unnecessarily blowing your own trumpet. An ideal mix is 80% industry-information posts and only 20% self-promotional posts, recommends Zara Burkein, in her article, Social Media Marketing: How to Choose Your Channels & Create Your Strategy for the Digital Marketing Institute.
Check What Your Competition is Doing
Closely monitoring the social media dynamics of your competition will help you set new benchmark for yourself, and later for the whole industry. Here as well, taking active help of social media listening tools to known which brand has the maximum social media impact. Buzzsumo is one such online resource that will help you figure out your competitor’s number of shares, length and styles that engage users the most. You will also discover the most important social media channels where they are getting the highest amount of social media shares.
Likewise, Brandwatch Analytics will assist you in studying your competitors’ social media performance on Facebook and Twitter. It gives you details of their social media imprints over the internet.
Presence, Visibility and Consistency
A dedicated resource from your end must keep a close eye on all your digital activities, including social media initiatives — -someone who can keep the engagement game friendly, effective and consistent. There are multiple tools available to help you. One of the most popular one is Hootsuite. It keeps an eye all your social media actions. You can also use it to set a schedule for publishing your posts, just as you may be doing on Buffer to catch your target audience at the right time and date.
Drive Consistency Through Your Handles
Try and keep the name of your brand same across all social media handles. Don’t create room for confusion with more than one name. Further, “Make sure you have a business logo image that you can upload as your profile image across all platforms, especially if you want people to remember who you are,” writes Said Sing Weist in 5 Tips for Picking the Right Social Media Platform for Your Business for social media platform, ClearVoice.
Number of Channels
Pew Research Center states that 91% of all retail brands operate on more than two social media channels, reports Adweek. Still, the number of platforms you get live on, has to be chosen wisely. Strike a balance between not too more and not too less, depending on what is your clear business adjective.
Some Statists to Chew On:
Over one billion active users
Millennials regularly use it at a 34% rate
Over 1.49 billion active everyday users
It is very popular in India, Brazil and Indonesia
50% of millennials use every month
40% of overall pinners have a family income of 100,000 $ per year
100 million daily active users
80% of the usage happens to be on mobile
50% male and 50% female users
43% of users hold the decision-making role
You Tube
1.8 billion monthly users
70% of traffic is through mobile
(Source Sylvia Ogweng, in her write up, The Ultimate Guide To Choosing The Best Social Media Channels For Your Business penned for Sked, a visual marketing creator agency.)
Other than these there are many factors such as nature of your business, type of content and other aspects that cannot be ignored to have the perfect social media planning in place. If you don’t have this competency in-house hire a social media optimization service, that have a strong track record in the field.
