If you are present on any of the key social media platforms, here are five key questions to ask about your activities, to help assess their effectiveness. These are useful if it's a fairly new activity for your business or organisation, or as an on-going check of a longer-established social media presence...
1. Have you matched a strategy to over-arching goals?
Having a presence, however well-presented and popular with visitors, isn't in itself enough. Simply saying: 'We're on social media' is a statement our Social Status team often hear. Having clear goals about what to do with your audience is vital. This might range from raising awareness, to gaining leads or selling products or services. Once all this is clear, you can then truly assess your use of such resources.
2. Have you a clearly defined range of buyer personas?
Through a clear understanding of both marketplace trends and the buying processes potential customers will follow, you can craft a range of key personas whom you need to reach. It's important to consider whether you are reaching out to too narrow, or too broad, an audience with each of your social media activities. To develop a successful total reach is likely to require a different range of social media actions and activities for these different personas.
3. Do you tailor, or fine-tune, your promotional activity for each platform you use?
When print was king, it would make no sense to create exactly the same ad for a trade publication as for a lifestyle magazine. Different audiences, levels of understanding, needs and attitudes had to be accommodated. With social media, it's also vital to appreciate that your audiences on, say, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube might be different. Promotions, tailored to a specific platform, will surely gain the best response.
4. Do you always send people to the same place?
Following on from the previous point, a typical example would be a simple link, from every social media platform to the homepage of your web presence. Yet, we already know these audiences may be different, to some degree, and be looking for different things. Therefore, having specific landing pages on your website to welcome arrivals from different social media platforms and campaigns makes sound sense.
5. Do you monitor the effectiveness of specific campaigns?
Returning to the 'We're on social media' comment from earlier, this can seem like the end-game - just to be there and visible - when, in reality, it's just the starting point. Monitoring the effectiveness of specific campaigns on a certain social media platform is vital. Assessing your activities as they are happening, with the ability to make swift amendments, even for current campaigns, is a huge plus for social media over other kinds of advertising or promotion. One thoroughly useful example would be to use simple A/B testing, delivering an on-going assessment of one possibility, idea, product or service against another.
Question Us!
Our youthful yet experienced, innovative and vibrant Social Status Media Agency team, based in South Melbourne, are ready for an obligation-free discussion covering the above areas, and many other vital questions, about the effectiveness of your brand, company or organisation. Talk to us now on (03)9682-6470
